DJUNA BARNES once described herself as the "most famous unknown author in the world". Despite her forty five poems, as many stories, twenty plays, two novels, and well over a hundred journalistic pieces, her fame (indeed, her infimy) stemmed more from her presence than it did from her work.
In this critical biography, Phillip Herring's purpose is to show that her rightful place is in "the pantheon of modernist writers"; (whatever that means) and to make her cruelly vituperative novels, Ryder and, especially, Nightwood, more comprehensible to contemporary readers. Despite, the enthusiasm which he brings to his pathetic subject, however, Herring's success is only partial.
Born in upstate New York in 1892, Djuna grew up in a household of sexual freedom so extreme that it probably involved various forms of incest. There is a particularly strong case against Djuna's paternal grandmother, Zadel, but Herring argues that correspondence between them, which included drawings of breasts and banter about their "pink tops", was merely Zadel's way of inculcating the principles of free love in her granddaughter. The closeness between them may explain Barnes's fervent belief that "one fell in love with the person, not the gender".
Zadel also tutored Djuna, especially in journalistic writing, in an effort to compensate for the child's conspicuous want of formal education. Through journalism, Barnes worked her way into the centre of artistic circles in New York and Paris. She embraced "radical anti bourgeois pro arte values", drank heavily, affected an adenoidal voice and cut an electrifying presence in her black cloaks, "outlandish make up", and tilted hats. She is reputed to have been haughty, gauche, wise cracking, bitching, two faced and disloyal.
Herring overstates his case for Barnes being a major modernist. At one point, he obliquely equates her first novel, Ryder (1928), with Ulysses on the feeble grounds that both challenged American legislation about obscenity. What he seems to have missed is that the two books are simply not in the same league.
Much of Barnes's work is derivative and imitative, some of it even plagiaristic. She borrowed blatantly from Synge, Eugene O'Neill, Hemingway, Eliot and Gertrude Stein (even though she claimed Stein "couldn't write for beans").
Published in 1937, the surrealist - Nightwood is the most lasting of Barnes's work, but even that is seriously flawed. Based on her tempestuous eight year "marriage" with Thelma Wood (in the book, Nora and Robin, respectively), it is full of circus performers and freaks, people with fabricated and spurious identities. Without psychologically sustained characters or any cohesive narrative, Nightwood is more than anything a stylised platform for Djuna's personal grievances.
When a friend (sic) described it as "sentimental shit of the worst kind", Djuna was quick to defend herself: "I gave praise to my sour grapes, they make exceeding excellent wine."
The publication of Nightwood was largely due to its endorsement, by T.S. Eliot. Ultimately, though, even Eliot had reservations about Barnes; to Edwin Muir, he described Djuna's later play, The Antiphon (1958), as "unutterably absurd".
In nearly the same breath that Herring extols Barnes as a modernist, he puts her in the more viable "American gothic" camp of Nathanael West and Flannery; O'Connor. This is not a new connection: O'Connor was aware of it and, in 1955, she mentioned in a letter that she had read "all the nuts like Djuna Barnes ...
For all her brashness and contempt, Barnes was overly sensitive to other people's opinion of her. Having lost the impetus to roar at the world, she spent the last forty years of her life raging, instead, in impenetrable silence. She died shortly after her ninetieth birthday, in June, 1982.
Herring is besotted with Barnes, but nothing he can write or say will make her a major figure. As Marianne Moore once put it, "reading Djuna Barnes is like reading a foreign language".