Set in the 1920s, but not published until 1936, this is by Djuna Barnes (1892-1982). She was born in the United States, but moved to Paris at the age of 30. She wrote articles, poems, stories, and novels; she was a talented illustrator; and she associated with many of the era's famed cultural figures, including Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, which is how I came to hear of her.

Sylvia Beach (in Shakespeare and Company) describes her as "so charming, so Irish, and so gifted" (I don't know of any Irish ancestry, so that descriptor, I assume, refers to her personality). Beach continues: "Her work ... did not resemble that of any other writer of the time... She was one of the most talented and, I think, one of the most fascinating literary figures in the Paris of the twenties."

"Jimmie the Barman" recalls (in This Must Be the Place): "Djuna Barnes, the writer, was one of my good friends who brought me many clients. She is very much of a lady and well liked. She was the cause of what Hemingway calls my 'greatest socking exploit' in Montparnasse." He goes on to explain what happened. "Frank", an American journalist (discreetly renamed), is pestering Barnes. Jimmie tries to lure him away. But Barnes follows them, and tells the nuisance exactly what she thinks of him. "Frank" then clouts her, plus a few others, including writer Robert McAlmon, who tries to restrain him. As soon as he's released, however, he's off again. Eventually, Jimmie slugs him three times: "The next day he did not remember who had hit him, but when he found out I do not think he held it against me." Heady times...


Djuna Barnes

***

Nightwood I found difficult, frankly. I read about half before we became busy with preparations for moving and travel, at which point I shelved it for a couple of months. While we were in Paris this week -- fired up by the locale, no doubt -- I read the rest in one gulp.

I'm not the only one to find Nightwood a bit indigestible. Sam Jordison, who runs The Guardian's reading group, described it as "one of the most divisive books we have tackled". I find her style both overburdened with metaphor and spikily abstract, and Jordison articulates this very well: "Barnes throws out the rules of structure, form and even sentence construction -- and that’s part of the fascination. Just as her outcast characters are trying to shrug off the shackles of early 20th-century society, so Barnes breaks the rules of prose... [She] often deliberately severs the link between her main verbs and her subjects in these long unwieldy sentences. It’s difficult -- but not without purpose."

I think the person who penned the flap text of the edition I read didn't know what to make of it either. It's the bizarrest bit of blurb I've ever come across: "This book, upon which Miss Barnes has been at work for a long time, is extremely difficult to describe. It is in prose, but will appeal primarily to readers of poetry; it has something of the form of the novel, but the characters suffer rather than act: and as with Dostoevski and George Chapman, one feels that the action is hardly more than the shadow-play of something taking place on another plane of reality. It is concerned with le miserable au centre de sa misere, and has nothing to offer to readers whose temperament attaches them to either an easy or a frightened optimism."

What??

T.S. Eliot, who wrote an Introduction for the 1937 edition, admits it took him a little time to appreciate its meaning, but concludes: "What I would leave the reader prepared to find is 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." High praise.

Scholar Phillip Herring, Barnes's biographer, confesses: "I wanted to teach Nightwood but felt frustrated by my futile attempts to understand it; before I could understand the novel, I believed, I had to understand Djuna Barnes." His research leads him to the conclusion that it is "one of the great novels of the 1930s". (I've seen only a sample chapter of this bio, but it would definitely be worth reading the whole thing.)

Author Siri Hustvedt speaks of being beguiled by the book in her twenties, and just as impressed 30 years later: "The wonder of Nightwood is not only stylistic. It lies in the range and depth of feeling the words convey. There is irony here and humor, too, but in the end, the novel is a hymn to the dispossessed, the misbegotten and those who love too much. At one time or another, I suspect that those adjectives describe most of us."


Barnes was also an accomplished artist. This is her cover for Trend magazine, October 1914


And this is her sketch of "a woman with hat"

***

So, what is Nightwood about?

We have five central characters. And, actually, when you get to the end, it's these very powerful figures that you'll remember, rather than the convoluted prose that delivered them to you.

Three of them love one of the others. And they love hopelessly, because this woman, Robin Vote, is the eternal bolter. She will never be confined. She will never be faithful. Therefore, loving her means certain unhappiness. When we first meet her, she is ill, and we're given this strange description: "About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorus glowing about the circumference of a body of water -- as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations -- the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in two worlds -- meet of child and desperado." That passage is a good example of the indigestibility of Barnes's writing, but also of its acuity. Robin is ineluctably and almost unconsciously in two worlds.

Felix Volkbein marries her. He is already insecure because of his Jewish ethnicity and doubtful lineage. (His father tried hard to be a nobleman, but the title rests on a somewhat precarious foundation. Nevertheless, Felix calls himself Baron Volkbein.) He's a bit of a mystery, and a solitary soul. He's obsessed with Old Europe and its aristocracy and nobility. He's always looking for the right thing to pay tribute to, and for someone else to give him meaning: "[A Jew's] undoing is never profitable until some goy has put it back into such shape that it can again be offered as a 'sign'. A Jew's undoing is never his own, it is God's; his rehabilitation is never his own, it is a Christian's." Why, quite, he thinks a relationship with Robin will work, we don't know... It's not long before he realizes that he is "not sufficient to make her what he had hoped". After the birth of their child, Robin takes to wandering again. One night, he comes home to find her standing in the dark. "As he came toward her she said in a fury, 'I didn't want him!' Raising her hand she struck him across the face... 'Why not be secret about him?' she said. 'Why talk?'" This take on motherhood, no doubt shocking in its day, is probably a lot more common than we like to admit...

Robin disappears. When she surfaces again, it's with Nora Flood. Nora runs "the strangest 'salon' in America": "It was the 'paupers' salon, for poets, radicals, beggars, artists, and people in love; for Catholics, Protestants, Brahmins, dabblers in black magic and medicine; all these could be seen sitting about her oak table before the huge fire, Nora listening, her hand on her hound, the firelight throwing her shadow and his high against the wall." She has "the face of all people who love the people"; and she's a welcoming listener. After a period of European travel, she and Robin settle in Paris. But Robin remains a mystery, always elusive, never graspable. As they did with Felix, her departures become more frequent, and Nora suffers from her unpredictability: "Robin was an amputation that Nora could not renounce."

Later, Nora realizes: "She couldn't tell me the truth, because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that?" But they lived through some traumatic encounters. Nora adds: "Robin's love and mine was always impossible, and loving each other, we no longer love. Yet we love each other like death... All the time she was watching me, to see that no one called, that the bell did not ring, that I got no mail, nor anyone hallooing in the court, though she knew that none of these things could happen. My life was hers... And one time, about three in the morning when she came in, she was angry because for once I had not been there all the time, waiting. She picked up the doll and hurled it to the floor and put her foot on it, crushing her heel into it... Robin can go anywhere, do anything... because she forgets, and I nowhere, because I remember." Yet, despite their separation, she still writes to Robin: "I've got to write to her... I've got to... She is myself. What am I to do?"

Jenny Petheridge is the woman Robin forsakes Nora for. Jenny is a cardboard sort of personality: "She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing... She could not participate in a great love, she could only report it... As, from the solid archives of usage, she had stolen or appropriated the dignity of speech, so she appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora's for Robin. She was a 'squatter' by instinct." Struggling to gain Robin's attention, Jenny attacks her in a fit of jealousy. You'd think this would be the end of things. But no: "It was not long after this that Nora and Robin separated; a little later Jenny and Robin sailed for America." Jenny soon realizes in her turn, however, that nothing can hold Robin. Another character asks later: "And Jenny, what of her now? Taken to drink and appropriating Robin's mind with vulgar inaccuracy."

Dr Matthew O'Connor is "an Irishman from the Barbary Coast (Pacific Street, San Francisco)". He's a doctor, but unlicensed. He's another restless soul, full of thoughts that he loves expounding, and always on the lookout for an opportunity, honest or not. There's something of the mountebank and magician about him. (Felix thinks that he's "a great liar, but a valuable liar".) He's an astute observer, on the other hand, and can be both prophetic and wise. Matthew is like a medium in which the other characters float. They all confide in him, and he mediates among them to some degree. He's also the one who homes in on truths about the others. When Felix confesses that he doesn't understand why Robin ever married him, Matthew replies: "She was in mourning for something taken away from her in a bombardment in the war." He tells poor deserted Nora, "Robin is not in your life, you are in her dream, you'll never get out of it. And why does Robin feel innocent? Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her 'escape' again."

But Matthew himself is an infinitely lonely and forlorn character, wrestling with the feeling that he has been born into the wrong body, and should have been a woman. He says to Nora: "Why is it that you want to talk to me? Because I'm the other woman that God forgot... Pray to the good God, she will keep you. Personally I call her 'she' because of the way she made me; it somehow balances the mistake." The final words of Matthew's that the book records sum up its grim message: "'Now,' he said, 'the end -- mark my words -- now nothing, but wrath and weeping.'"

The final chapter, entitled The Possessed, is ambiguous, but hardly hopeful. In the United States now, Robin leaves Jenny, and heads again to Nora's part of the country. She sleeps rough in the neighbourhood until, one night, she is found by Nora and her dog. Robin pretends to be a dog herself, terrorizing the animal until both are exhausted.


The Jardin du Luxembourg. Not far from the Boulevard St-Germain, where Barnes lived

***

According to Herring, Barnes said her famous novel was "the soliloquy of a 'soul talking to itself in the heart of the night'". It is based on her eight-year relationship with a Saint Louis artist named Thelma Wood: "Writing this novel allowed Barnes to purge herself of the overpowering anger and bitterness she felt when Thelma left her for another woman... To Emily Coleman, a dear friend, Barnes wrote that Thelma 'was that terrible past reality, over which any new life can only come, as a person marching up and over the high mound of a grave... I have HAD my great love, there will never be another.' Though tragic, Nightwood is wickedly satirical...; but through Nightwood's play of styles one hears anguished voices protesting that life seems a vicious joke."

As a study of gender-nonconformity, confused identity, otherness, and despair (there's really no happy ending for anyone), it is indeed a bleak and memorable book. I find this description very apt: "The novel travels, like its author, from America to Paris, then back again, but the overwhelming texture is that of interiority, and the space the reader is invited to inhabit is the inner world of each character... There is a sense of dread in the novel, a claustrophobia. Above all, and somewhat obviously, it is concerned with night-time, with darkness, with the ability to make oneself elusive... It is a disturbing read. It is dark, and it is unrelenting, even grotesque... Though often beautiful, the language of Nightwood can be ugly and frightening as well. There are times it borders on horror."

All true. I'm glad I finished it, though. It leaves you with a little shudder, but also with lots to ponder.


Henry Murger (1822-61) shared some similarities with Barnes: Born to a modest family; friend of poets, writers, and painters in the heart of Paris; wrote articles for various publications; lived a Bohemian life...

***

Other interesting things:

1.
In a compendium of "meals of the Lost Generation", Barnes's contribution is "a salad of winter lettuces". Why is that somehow so appropriate...?

2.
In 1922, Barnes interviewed James Joyce in Paris for Vanity Fair, a few months after the publication of Ulysses.


Portrait of Joyce by Djuna Barnes

Popova writes: "Barnes, who went on to befriend Joyce over the course of the four months she spent in Paris that year, notes that 'one may not ask him questions, one must know him' and recounts their talks, the conduit of knowing: '...We have talked of women; about women he seems a bit disinterested. Were I vain, I should say he is afraid of them, but I am certain he is only a little skeptical of their existence… We have talked of death, of rats, of horses, of the sea; languages, climates and offerings. Of artists and of Ireland.'"

Joyce appreciated Barnes sufficiently to give her the original annotated manuscript of Ulysses. He probably influenced her writing, but hers may well also have been reflected in his, especially in Finnegans Wake.

All of which is a bit of a reminder to get on with more Joyce (in abeyance since our Trieste days).

And, of course, I'm now intrigued enough to try more Barnes. And so it never ends...