This made me smile when I saw it; it seems to so perfectly encapsulate the punctilious austerity that defined Barnes’s public persona during the last decades of her life. The brief description provided on the auction listing confirms the recipient as Robert Wilson, owner of the Phoenix Bookshop in Greenwich Village. What Barnes is specifically declining remains unspecified—and almost preferably so.
This blog is long overdue for an update—and a #jessewritesathesis update in particular. In brief: I’m chipping away at it! Progress doesn’t accumulate nearly as quickly as I’d like, of course, but I now have several docs that hold quite a bit of writing. Still learning to avert—or rather, manage—the crippling inner editor who insists that every sentence or phrase be “perfect” before moving to the next, but things are slowly improving.
The most important development which specifically warrants an update post, however, is that after many years of hoping and scheming I was finally able to do some actual archival research for this thesis. Two weeks ago I spent three days at the University of Austin’s Harry Ransom Center sifting through their extensive holdings on both Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, and it just couldn’t have been a better experience. I was constantly impressed with how the Ransom Center and their staff were able to balance a (rightful) sense of protection over the remarkable material in their possession and an obvious commitment to access. As someone currently suspended somewhere between the categories of scholar and student, it was heartening to see that alongside the scholars were what seemed to be a constant stream of undergraduate students accessing and perusing material.
[That said, even though the Center is extremely generous in allowing users to take as many photos of the material as they want, one must sign a strict confidentiality agreement that forbids sharing it without written permission. So unfortunately I can’t provide any images to accompany the things I mention below. Just an FYI—I’m not being stingy!]
What did I find? Well, that three days was hardly enough to even pretend that I’d managed to scratch the surface in regards to what’s available for discovery in both of these archives. It’s been very heartening to see both Ford and Tyler receiving increasing scholarly interest over the last year or so—something itself I should do a write-up one of these days—which leads me to assume that eyes are starting to get on this material (indeed, I was told someone had been working with the Ford material the week before I arrived), but it was also IMMEDIATELY clear that this is a “story”—indeed, multiple stories—that needs, is even demanding, to be told. Though I was forced to do a lot of scanning/speed-reading, Ford’s prolific correspondence (of which this is only a partial holding; there also seems to be much held at Yale’s Beinecke Library, to say nothing of holdings in archives of his countless correspondents) offers so much first-person documentation of modernism, American expatriatism, the pre-Stonewall queer experience, and early twentieth century American/European culture in general—in addition offering perspectives that have been generally kept to the peripheries of historical accounts of these eras and communities.
Image of a typical Djuna Barnes letter found online [NOT from the Ransom Center collection]
Other highlights: several draft fragments from The Young and Evil that provide insight into Ford and Tyler’s collaborative process, as well as facsimile copies of Ford’s correspondence with Gertrude Stein which helped illuminate her involvement with the text.
And finally, more information which only led to more mystery: one of the central enigmas that has emerged during my research is the figure of Kathleen Tankersley Young, a poet and critic initially associated with the Harlem Renaissance and appeared in a number of the “little magazines” of the period. As well as taking on a kind of mentorship role and co-editor credit for Ford’s literary magazine Blues, she is important to The Young and Evil, not only as the novel’s dedicatee but appearing as the text’s only major female character. From her poetry I had started to suspect that she is actually a more crucial influence on Ford and Tyler than even Barnes and Stein; reading through her letters has only confirmed this.
Yet despite all these fascinating connections (and others—she went on to found a minor but admired publication company before a tragic and mysterious early death) Young currently remains more or less invisible—indeed, the several mentions of her currently out there (mostly in studies and compilations of women connected to the Harlem Renaissance) can only mention that practically nothing is known about her. Indeed, I’ve yet to come across a photograph of her. I was cautiously hoping an image of some kind would emerge somewhere in Ford’s material, but that ended up not being the case (at least in what I was able to go through)—though I sense that a dramatic pencil sketch of a female face on one of her letters might be a portrait of her. I’m now more curious than ever about this fascinating, unknown figure; if anybody reading this happens to have ANY information on Young, please get in touch with me! (My info is in the “About” section.)
The Ransom Center actually shared on their Instagram account a snippet from one of letters from Young that I was able to look at, making it (I presume) ok to share here. I’ll also include below a few other images taken outside the restricted Reading Room.
It’s taken the two weeks since to simply organize and upload the notes and images (nearly 250 of them!) that I took over the course of the three days. Now it’s time to dive back into the writing—something I’m taking on again with a renewed sense of excitement and engagement. Wish me luck!
Top to bottom:
By the time I felt like I was finally getting a handle on this bitter, black-hearted little novel, it was all over. As I quickly discovered, to make the acquaintance of these titular two ladies is to be initiated into a state of perpetual disorientation; I was not, I’ll frankly admit, adequately prepared, even if Bowles’s novel frequently brought to mind the work of her contemporaries Djuna Barnes and Flannery O’Connor, two favorites of mine.
All three authors have an uncanny ability to distill unsettling visions of the world into terrifying portraits of individuals who, by simply defying the “natural” order of things, unleash an aura of chaos and existential anarchy around everything they do. Yet turmoil is often the source of humor, and I’d say the work of all three is funny—albeit in bleak, dark ways. But where Barnes and O’Connor employ violence (both emotional and physical) and grotesquerie to elicit the kind of laugh that transforms into a horrified gasp before it manages to escape the throat, Bowles’s approach is more akin to screwball comedy, a comedy of manners where the main players have decided to redefine what “manners” entail, upending the world around them (ie “until recently [Miss Goering] had never followed too dangerously far in action any course which she had decided upon as being the morally correct one”). That said, these forms of comedies depend on a sense of order and decorum reestablishing itself by the resolution, typically with a romantic pairing reinstating the “unruly” female safely back into the social order. Not so with Two Serious Ladies: it’s instead a whirligig of despair whose last words offer no sense of solace. Instead it feels like a temporary stopgap in an inevitably continuing story destined for misery and destruction.
Bowles portrait by Carl Van Vechten, 1951
But also, in the meantime, a sense of escape, even freedom. Perhaps?
Aware of the general outline of Bowles’s biography (sadly, an infamously tragic one), one of the things I was curious was if she would be working in the grand queer tradition of taking up a certain term to signify covert lifestyles and behaviors, and there does seem to be some evidence to support such a reading. In the novel’s first few pages Miss Gamelon inexplicably moves in with Miss Goering—indeed, I assumed these would be the two “serious” ladies—and immediately entwine themselves into an incredibly intense codependent relationship; Mrs. Copperfield has a similar impulse toward Pacifica, noting that the Panamanian prostitute “takes everyone quite seriously” as she takes “Pacifica’s hand in her own.” I’ll be paying closer attention to this on inevitable (at some point) repeat readings, but whatever inflection one wants to read into them, it is undeniable that there are not only more than just two serious ladies populating Bowles’s novel, and, furthermore, all take their relationships with other ladies very, very seriously.
Jane Bowles & Truman Capote (Marruecos, 1949) by Cecil Beaton
Barnes’s rueful observation the she was “the most famous unknown in the world” also resonates with Bowles’s own legacy, having long been regarded as one of the great, undersung prose stylists of the twentieth century, inspiring an almost cult-like veneration from writers who achieved a much larger degree of fame than she ever managed to (Tennessee Williams’s proclamation that Two Serious Ladies is “his favorite book” and that he “can’t think of a modern novel that seems more likely to become a classic” continues to adorn current reprints of the novel; Truman Capote, John Ashbery, and Bowles’s own husband Paul were vocal supporters). Millicent Dillon has more recently described how “one soon begins to know the sound of a Jane Bowles sentence, its odd jumps, the way in which it continuously confounds expectations, the way in which secrets are withheld and as suddenly revealed.”
Perhaps Bowles does reveal some secrets throughout the tangled trajectories of the two serious ladies of Two Serious Ladies, but it seems more defined by its resolution to always remain something of an enigma, restless and on edge. And while I can’t say I actually much enjoyed the process of reading this novel, I nonetheless sense that it’s going to join the small cadre of texts I find myself returning to on occasion, almost inexplicably, trying to scratch some kind of deep itch it has created. To try and discover answers to some of the unnerving existential questions it poses—even if I never really expect to ever actually find them.
Works Cited
Bowles, Jane. Two Serious Ladies. 1943. New York City: Ecco, 2014.
Dillon, Millicent. “Jane Bowles: Experiment as Character.” Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989.
Further Reading
Romaine Brooks (February 2, 1972 – December 7, 1970) – 96
Natalie Clifford Barney (October 31, 1876 – February 2, 1972) – 95
Jeanne Galzy (September 30 1883 – May 7, 1977) – 93
Rachilde [Marguerite Vallette-Eymery] (February 11, 1860 – April 4, 1953) – 93
Gisèle Freund (November 19, 1908 – March 31, 2000) – 92
Djuna Barnes (June 12, 1892 – June 18, 1982) – 90
Alice B. Toklas (April 30, 1877 – March 7, 1967) – 89
Bryher [Annie Winifred Ellerman] (September 2, 1894 – January 28, 1983) – 88
Solita Solano (1888 – November 22, 1975) – 86/87
Janet Flanner (March 13, 1892 – November 7, 1978) – 86
Mina Loy (27 December 1882 – 25 September 1966) – 83
Colette (28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954) – 81
Queer modernist ladies tended to live loooooong lives. Was it the French air? Or something in the tea served at The Temple of Friendship??
[To continue celebrating Djuna Barnes this week and because I was thinking about it in light of a film adaptation currently in the works, I’ve decided to revisit and expand this review which was originally posted on Goodreads.]
…
“‘The Night-Life of Love,’ said Saint Musset, ‘burns I think me in the slightly muted Crevices of all Women who have been a little sprung with continual playing of the Spring Song, though I may be mistaken, for be it known, I have not yet made certain on this point.'”
Even after more than eight decades critics and scholars still squabble over what exactly Djuna Barnes was trying to accomplish with her Ladies Almanack. Is it an affectionate satire? An exuberant celebration? A sly denunciation? A parodic exercise in self-loathing?
Of course, this is Djuna Barnes we are talking about, so it’s probably all of these things, though perhaps “none of the above” gets even a bit closer to the heart of the matter. But these tensions touch upon exactly the thing that most compels me most about Barnes’s text—it somehow can manage to encompass nearly all interpretations one could possible pose, but stakes itself definitively to none of them. Which makes it a superlative example of one of my academic interests: the conveyance of queer content through “queered” form.
Photograph of Djuna Barnes and Natalie Clifford Barney, c. 1930.
The Almanack is deliberately constructed to work simultaneously on two different levels, with different sets of meaning available to different communities of readers. For the uninitiated the text can come off as a rather bewildering–perhaps even incomprehensible–take on medieval hagiography, with its mock-reverent depiction of Dame Evangeline Musset and her seemingly limitless benevolence toward young women in need.
Some readers, however, might also pick up that Dame Musset’s munificence is not purely altruistic in nature, but extends to a more sensual dimension that involves the women’s “Hinder Parts, and their Fore Parts, and in whatsoever Parts did suffer them most” (Barnes 6). But Barnes herself readily admitted that her Almanack was more than anything intended for “the private domaine” [sic], to be “distributed to a very special audience” (cited Lanser 164); that “special audience” was first and foremost Natalie Clifford Barney, as well as the many members of the lesbian-centric coterie that assembled around her in Paris. And not only was Barney & co. the audience that would be able to understand the layers of meaning shrouded within the narrative, they comprised of the subject matter themselves, as the text’s expansive cast of characters all had real-life counterparts that were being wittily caricatured (see below).
Key to the characters of Ladies Almanack I once made for a seminar presentation.
Privately printed and distributed, it’s interesting to consider how the Ladies Almanack was part of a spontaneous(?) flowering of literature published in 1928 that prominently featured same-sex desire–and sometimes dared even more–between women, including Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women, The Hotel by Elizabeth Bowen, and, perhaps most importantly in a purely historical sense, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (for a good consideration of the importance of the year 1928 to feminist and/or lesbian texts I highly recommend Bonnie Kime Scott’s important 1995 study Refiguring Modernism, Volume I: The Women of 1928).
Original illustration by Djuna Barnes for Ladies Almanack
It is particularly enlightening to contrast Ladies Almanack to the latter of these novels, for not only does Hall, along with her longtime partner Una, Lady Troubridge, make appearances within Barnes’s text, but it throws into sharp relief Barnes’s own aim and approach in regards to both content and aesthetics. On the most obvious level, Barnes’s obscure, archaic utilization of language and form in the Almanack is a far cry from Hall’s unambiguously presented apologia-cum-petition. But unlike the wealthy Hall who could use her artistocratic lineage and social privilege to withstand public backlash, Susan Snaider Lanser writes that for Barnes, penniless and an American expatriate, it was “better to shroud [the overtly lesbian content] in obscurity, generating a prose whose meanings dissolve beneath a torrent of difficult words and sentences” (166).
As such, Ladies Almanack can’t just be considered an example of willful high modernist obfuscation; at the same time, its stylistic choices can’t just be solely marked up as a method for eluding censorship either. Rather, it’s something between, I’d argue, an alchemical concoction that attempts to avoid simply shoehorning queer–and intensely personal and private–topics and desires into traditional novelistic forms (The Well of Loneliness again, which can make for a rough reading experience today in its relentless proselytizing), with the purpose of beginning to articulate a new means of expression altogether. Barnes accomplishes this by queerly cherry-picking elements from a variety of sources both historical and modernist, which makes it a kind of anomaly, much like her much more well-known Nightwood, within high modernist literature, of which she was one of the most prominent (if perpetually undervalued) figures.
All these factors–and many others I’m necessarily sidestepping at present–lead to a text that is at once both outdated and undateable, and as playfully and deliberately enigmatic today as it must have been in 1928.
And hell, it’s just an awful lot of fun.
Djuna Barnes’s original illustration of Dame Musset’s funeral. Let’s just say it’s this is not the bleak scene you might assume it is…
WORKS CITED
Barnes, Djuna. Ladies Almanack. (1928). Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1992. Print.
Lanser, Susan Sniader. “Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the Discourse of Desire.” Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Ed. Mary Lynn Broe. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 156-68. Print.
Dolly Wilde (Slaveya Minkova) and Djuna Barnes (Josefin Granqvist) appearing in a cinematic reimagining of the “Ladies Almanack” by Djuna Barnes
Shame on me for failing to make some kind of mention of Djuna Barnes’s birthday last Friday (June 12), but considering that the date of her passing is June 18, I figure it would be appropriate over the next several days to celebrate all things DB.
For my first post, I thought I’d bring some attention to a fascinating project I’ve been following for a while now, a film adaptation of Barnes’s fascinating/bewildering/bewitching roman à clef Ladies Almanack which is currently in production. It is being written and directed by Chicago-based writer, performer, and filmmaker Daviel Shy.
Cover of “Ladies Almanack” with illustration by Djuna Barnes
According to the film’s website, The Ladies Almanack will be “a feature-length experimental narrative film,” and that it will be “a kaleidoscopic tribute to women’s writing through the friendships, jealousies, flirtations and publishing woes of authors and artists in 1920’s Paris.” For those not familiar with Barnes’s original text, it was written in 1928 and privately published that same year, and reportedly undertaken for the amusement of Natalie Clifford Barney and the circle of lesbian artists associated with the celebrated salon she hosted in Paris. Drawing equally upon literary elements both archaic and modernist, in mock-Rabelaisian style Barnes casts Barney and her friends (which include Romaine Brooks, Radclyffe Hall, Mina Loy, Janet Flanner, and many others) and almost beatifies them, casting the coterie’s various in-jokes, tangled relationships, and interpersonal tensions almost as a form of medieval hagiography. I haven’t at all managed to do justice to Ladies Almanack in this brief description, but will just say that while I found this a strange and perplexing work on my first reading, after some research and several more reads I now find it to be as screamingly funny as much as it is artistically and conceptually innovative. Barnes’s witty and characteristically eccentric illustrations only further emphasize these qualities.
Mimi Francetti (Fannie Sosa) and Lily de Gramont (Merci Michel) in “The Ladies Almanack”
I’m pexcited about Shy’s adaptation precisely because all available information and imagery makes it seem like there is little interest in “faithfully” adapting Barnes’s anarchic text, but rather Shy is extensively–and I’d say appropriately–reimagining the project Barnes herself originally set out to undertake. According to the film’s website, “each character is a hybrid of the historically researched figure and the contemporary artist who portrays her,” and, intriguingly, Shy is casting Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Monique Wittig as narrators, with Cixous actually portraying herself and Eileen Myles embodying Wittig. Iconic queer filmmaker and actress Guinevere Turner (Go Fish, The L Word) will play Liane de Pougy. My impulse is that Shy is undertaking some really clever strategies to access this text within the context of 2015, with the potential for representing how the queer legacies of this particular storied moment of the queer past possesses a legacy that continues to resonant in the queer present.
Collage Cover of “The Ladies Almanack” by Sarah Patten
I’m also particularly pleased that the film is intentionally taking on an experimental style, and the images that have been shared on the film’s website and through other social media sources have brought to mind the work of numerous queer artists, from the lush style and evocative anachronism of Derek Jarman and Werner Schroeter, to Barbara Hammer’s erotic utopianism, to the stylized posing of Claude Cahun’s portraiture, to the inventive and insatiable cultural bricolage of Jack Smith. The film’s stated “Bibliography” demonstrates that Shy & co. have definitely done their homework in regards to literary based research, and I’m expecting the same regarding the film’s visual sensibility, which certainly seems to be operating within the tradition of queer non-mainstream filmmaking.
The film’s Profile page also excites me, as it is clear that the Ladies Almanack will be representing a large swath of the contemporary queer community in all of its diversity, beautiful idiosyncrasy, and immense creative energy.
The production is still raising funds to help get the project completed–I donated last week during a fundraiser they were holding. Otherwise, keep up the project through the website’s news page, its Facebook page, or tumblr site. I’ve also been enjoying wandering through Daviel Shy’s personal site.
To close, several more collages by Sarah Patten, which are reportedly going to serve as chapter headings in the film. To say I’m obsessed with them is an understatement.
Mina Loy (Brenna Kail) by Sarah Patten
Thelma Wood (Erin Jackson (aka Audio Jack)) by Sarah Patten
Dolly Wilde (Slaveya Minkova) by Sarah Patten
Renée Vivien (Caitlin Baucom) by Sarah Patten
So it’s been a while–a looooong while–but we’re back!
Here’s what here/queer/modernist out in the world [wide web]:
What a lovely and unexpected surprise to be scrolling through Jezebel.com last week and amid the usual ephemeral news items and celebrity gossip suddenly find myself accosted by the turbaned splendor and imperious gaze of Djuna Barnes. Laura June gives a detailed but accessible overview of Barnes’s life and career, and I particularly love the term “shocking modernist,” a most apt description for the divine Ms. Djuna.
The Modernist Studies Association (MSA) has launched the website for MSA 17, their annual academic conference. MSA 17 will be held this year in Boston, and take place November 19-22. One of these years I’ll manage to attend it myself, but in the meantime I’ll simply read in a longing manner about planned seminars such as the ones on “Modernist Jargon” and “Modern American Lit and Visual Culture.” Looking forward to the appearance of the full conference program.
The Beverley Hills estate owned by Countess Dorothy di Frasso (née American heiress Dorothy Taylor) and inhabited by Marlene Dietrich recently sold for $23.5 million(!), and the photos attest that the home has seen few changes since it’s 1930’s heyday. Designed and decorated by Elsie de Wolfe, the Art Deco-ish splendor is truly a sight to behold. In particular, I can’t stop staring at the photo of the living room below–I just want to sit on the couch, sip a martini or two, silently stare at the hand-painted wallpaper for a good day or so, and hope an apparition of Marlene eventually drops by. The Last Goddess Blog has a wonderful post of images of Dietrich inhabiting the home that I highly recommend as well. Alas, I can’t imagine that the home will stay with this way now that it has been sold, and that’s an utter shame.
Elsie de Wolfe decor in Marlene Dietrich’s home
Indra Tamang, Charles Henri Ford’s artistic collaborator who runs The Charles & Ruth Project page on Facebook, recently organized a fundraiser to help victims of the earthquakes that have devastated his native Nepal. As well as Nepalese performers, Debbie Harry, Penny Arcade, and others contributed their talents to the evening.
“Almost as remarkable as Andy Warhol’s productivity, and ongoing ubiquity, is his variousness.” The Boston Globe surveys a number of recent exhibitions dedicated to Warhol’s prodigious and eclectic output (including the Montreal Museum’s “Warhol Mania” show I was able to catch several months ago) and spotlights “Warhol By the Book” currently running at Williams College Museum of Art until August 19. It reportedly showcases more than 400 objects, including unique and unpublished materials. I find A Gold Book by Andy Warhol (right) particularly arresting.
The Blue Lantern has a lovely consideration of les garçonnes, which “the French called them, using their gendered language to suggest that women in the decades between the two world wars had turned into some kind of hybrid of male and female, not androgynous exactly but definitely new.” (Off topic perhaps, but I can’t help but also recommend her evocative and illuminating post on Antonioni & Vitti’s films as well.)
“Los Angeles’ Queer History: Living the Legacy,” an informative post from the Windy City Times, pinpoints a number of unexpected queer historical sites to consider visiting in the City of Angels.
…
As always, if there’s anything of note I should be aware of, please feel free to drop me a line!
Here’s what here/queer/modernist out in the world [wide web]:
Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, & Alice B. Toklas, January 4, 1935.
Well, it certainly seems to have been a very Carl Van Vechten week. Not everyone might be pleased with the latest Edward White biography, but it has certainly seemed to spark a lot of reinterest in his life and his work. Here’s a rundown of some CVV things that appeared this last week:
Most substantial was White’s long essay for The Paris Review, which specifically focuses on his relationship with Gertrude Stein: “Stein knew how crucial Van Vechten was to her career—not merely in the practical aspects of getting her work into print, read, and discussed, but in helping create and disseminate the mythology that surrounds her name. ‘I always wanted to be historical, almost from a baby on,’ Stein freely admitted toward the end of her life. ‘Carl was one of the earliest ones that made me be certain that I was going to be.’”
Two things I never expected to have to write in the same sentence: Carl Van Vechten made an appearance on Craigslist this last week. Here in San Francisco first edition copies of Music and Bad Manners (1916) and Interpreters and Interpretations (1917), owned by the same family for nearly a century, showed up on the popular classifieds website. Place in the “if I had a spare $600 just lying around…” file.
“Carl Van Vechten: Photographer to the Stars” is an exhibition opening this week at Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, the local museum of CVV’s hometown. It features a collection of photographs that CVV himself donated to the museum in 1946 and which was later augmented by his estate, and runs through September 7.
This spotlight topic at glbtq.org this month is the Harlem Renaissance, which features a number of queer modernist luminaries, including Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Countee Cullen, and, of course Van Vechten himself. Why Richard Bruce Nugent, the most overtly out of this circle doesn’t have his own page at this point, however, remains something of a mystery.
ALSO:
City Light Books will be publishing a 50th anniversary edition of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, which was first published in 1964 as part of the publisher’s famous Pocket Poet Series. The new edition will feature a forward by O’Hara’s friend, the poet John Ashbury. The also point to a feature over at The Atlantic regarding the collection, as well as a reading of the entire book taking place in New York City on June 11.
Modernist Cultures has just released their May 2014 issue, with a focus on modernism and dance. Featuring Nijinsky (of course), Josephine Baker, Pavlova, Massine, etc, etc.–can’t wait to dive into this! (Not sure what the access issues are, email me if you’re having issues.)
An essay titled “Kleist’s Cycle of Consciousness: Modeling Identity in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood” by Karen Lively has been posted by The California Journal of Women Writers, a publication I clearly need to start paying attention to.
What did I miss? Please let me know!
“You see,” she continued, “some people drink poison, some take the knife, others drown. I take you.”
As anybody familiar with the singular artistic vision of Djuna Barnes is well aware, reading anything she wrote is like entering a type of parallel universe—one that resembles our own in many ways, but also one that is no longer able to repress and erase what is odd or sad or grotesque, particularly in regards to the human condition. As an astute commentator much smarter than me has noted, reading Barnes is to enter a textual space “in which the normative becomes, for once in history, the excluded, the taboo, and the unmentionable” (Boone 235).
Barnes was a prolific artist and her written work encompasses journalism, interviews, novels, plays, poetry, criticism, and a copious amount of wittily irascible letters exchanged with just about all of the great cultural luminaries of the 20th century (unfortunately a collection has yet to emerge, so for now one can catch glimpses of them in the countless biographies and commentaries detailing the modernist era).
She was also, of course, a short story writer, and this was my first extended encounter with her short-form fiction work. Once one becomes familiar with Barnes’s baroque style and bleak worldview it is difficult to not immediately recognize her writing, which helps in being able to contextualize these stories with all of the other modes she expressed herself in. But I also found them different in a crucial way as well, for if her novels and longer fiction feel like a meander through a shape-shifting dream world, the short stories operate quite differently. Within these little slips of short stories–many no more than several pages long–Barnes is somehow able to contract and compress entire cosmos of feeling, affect, experiences, and histories (of both a personal and cultural nature) into the space of several pages.
Not that this ever seems the case at the beginning of each story. Barnes’s general technique is to introduce several eccentric characters, establish a setting and then embroider these elements in a delicate meshwork of commentary and observations that are unexpected and incisive and beautiful. Often they hardly seem like “stories” at all, but rather character sketches, all evocative description and not much else. But that impression is deceptive, for almost like clockwork in the closing lines something inevitably happens—a snippet of dialogue perhaps, or a turn of phrase—and suddenly everything comes together in a brief flash of insight. It’s not exactly that everything seems to “fall into place,” or it is like a puzzle with an “aha!” conclusion, or even that it feels like an epiphany, but somehow everything always seemed to come together in the very last moment, almost improbably, suddenly making (some kind of) sense of everything that came before
“Spillway” was earlier published as “A Night Among the Horses”
But “sense” isn’t even the right word, as it’s something more ambiguous and indescribable than that. But whatever it is it’s extremely potent: there were several times upon reaching the end of a story that I had to set the book down for a few minutes, blown away by an unexpected wave of emotion that just coursed through me. How? I likely wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Why? Glancing back through the stories now, I can’t exactly tell anymore. And yet somehow, fleetingly, in the moment of reading these stories they would somehow reveal an emotional coherence, and often to devastating effect.
Needless to say, it didn’t take long for me to become fully convinced that Barnes is one of the great short story writers, even if she is rarely anthologized, and I’d be quite surprised if she’s ever included as a “how-to” example in a guide to writing a “good” short story. Because by any standards these stories shouldn’t work. But somehow they do, and the results are unlike just about anything else I’ve ever encountered or had the great pleasure to read.
[A version of this review was originally posted on Goodreads.]
NOTE
Spillway was originally published in 1923 under the title A Book, and a new edition was published in 1929 under title: A Night Among the Horses.
WORKS CITED
Barnes, Djuna. Spillway and Other Stories. 1923. New York City: Harper & Row, 1972.
Boone, Joseph Allen. Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998.
queer modernisms 