Guest Reviewer Peter Klappert

(Though not poetry, this collection brings together the work of an artist whose writing has influenced, and continues to influence, many poets and writers.)

If one short novel is enough to establish a writer as "major," and it is, then Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) achieved that distinction in 1936, when Nightwood was published in London. The first edition carried an introduction by T.S. Eliot which has accompanied subsequent printings and in which he praises "the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy." Later, with enthusiasm that just manages to outshine an absurd, lamentable hyperbole, the language-addicted poet Dylan Thomas called Nightwood "One of the three great prose books ever written by a woman."    [ Click to Order Barnes Collected Stories (soft $) ]

In addition to its many incidental pleasures, three things make Nightwood powerful and compelling: the dark brifliance of the writing, which is by turns aphoristic, satirical, witty, passionate, musical, melancholy, sonorous, biblical and funereal; the love story of Robin Vote and Nora Flood, two American women on the Left Bank in the incredible Paris of the 1920s; and Dr. Matthew Mighty-grain-o-sand Dante O'Connor, the novel's Tiresian commentator, confessor, and chorus. It is now widely known that Robin was modeled on the great love of Barnes' life, Thelma Wod, Nora on Barnes herself, and Dr. O'Connor on the Irish-American, quack doctor, sometime abortionist, flamboyantly campy homosexual and cafe raconteur, Daniel Mahoney.

Nightwood was published in the United States in 1937 and published again by New Directions in 1946: it has remained in print for 50 years. Yet as recently as the early 1970s, Barnes and her work were comparatively unknown. One sometimes encountered groups of friends (particlarly gay and lesbian readers) who were devoted to the novel, but one also encountered professors of modern fiction who had not read Nightwood--or had read it with distaste and condescension. Barnes collection of short stories, published as A Book (1923) and as A Night Among The Horses (1929), received little attention when it reappeared, edited and revised, as The Spillway (London, 1962; New York, 1972). The Selected Works of Djuna Barnes (1962) did not much extend Barnes' audience or get her into the college curriculum. Other works of fiction, particularly Ladies Almanack and Ryder, were hardly known and hard to come by.

All that has changed over the last quarter century, thanks to the rise of feminism and gender studies, the recognition by scholars of something called "gay and lesbian literature," the recognition by publishers of something called "gay, lesbian and bi-sexual readers," and by curiosity about Barnes' life. Since 1976, she has been the subject of three critical biographies, most recently Phillip Herring's superb Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes.

Barnes has been called "The Garbo of literature": although she was a sought-after and well-paid journalist and interviewer in the early decades of this centry (when she interviewed F. Scott Fitzgerald, he reportedly said "I ought to be interviewing you!"), although she was part of the legendary expatriate community in Paris after World War One and was "the red-haired Bohemian" liked and admired by such figures as Joyce, Eliot, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Robert McAlmon, Mina Loy, Peggy Guggenheim and Janet Flanner, Barnes spent the last half of her life as a virtual recluse in a small apartment in Gqeenwich Village. She spent those solitary 42 years in straightened circumstances, although not (as one sometimes hears) in abject poverty. Ironically enough, among the seven requests for the movie rights to Nightwood that she turned down was one from Ingmar Bergman: legend has it she might have relented, if Bergman could have signed Garbo for the role of Robin!

Barnes spent the last decade of her life feeling besieged. She trid to get the feminist bookstore, Djuna Books, to change its name; she denied a mime troupe permission to do an interpretation of Nightwood; although she would not read the manuscript, Barnes vehemently opposed publication of my book of poems, The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty (an extended homage to Nightwood and to the Paris of the inter-war years) and kept it out of print for four years. When Douglas Messerli, publisher of Sun & Moon Prss, discovered that Barnes' early stories had gone out of copyright, she tried--and failed--to stop him from publishing them as Smoke and Other Early Stories (1982).

If Messerli caused the combative octogenarian discomfort, he has more than redeemed himself. Collected Stories is the most recent of six Barnes' titles from Sun & Moon Press, and three more books are in preparation. There are forty-three stories here, edited and introduced by Barges' biographer Phillip Herring and accompanied by a substantial bibliographic note by Messerli, ranging from early, naive work such as "The Terrible Peacock" (1914) to her last story, the high-spirited, witty and satirical "The Perfect Murder" (1942). As Barnes' readers would expect, all are economical (the longest is twenty-one pages, the shortest barely two) and consciously--sometimes, too self-consciously--crafted.

Readers who come to the Collected Stories expecting Nightwood's desperate, passionate words about the betrayal of love will be disappointed. They will find nothing like

"Time isn't long enough," [Nora] said, striking the table. "It isn't long enough to live down [Robin's] nights. God," she cried, "what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you prepare for that? Everything we can't bear in the world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.... There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation--purty's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?"