Djuna Barnes was born in 1892 in a New York artists’ colony. Her father was a dilettante painter and polygamist, whose wife, mistress and their children all lived in the same household supported by his equally free-thinking mother Zadel. Djuna Barnes received little formal schooling (though Jack London and Franz Lizst were often house guests) until she enrolled in art school in the 1910s. After her parents divorced she became a journalist and illustrator in New York, soon entering the bohemian life of Greenwich Village and becoming friends with the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Eugene O’Neill. Her journalistic style was often “sensational” and participatory, as she would write about such things as entering a gorilla’s cage, being force fed, and getting rescued from the top of a skyscraper.
Djuna Barnes was bisexual, and had relationships with both men and women during her years in Greenwich Village. In 1914 she was engaged to an Ernst Hanfstaengl, then a publisher of art prints and friend of Franklin D Roosevelt. Hanfstaengl broke up with her in 1916, apparently because he wanted a German wife, and he later returned to Germany and became a close associate of Herr Hitler.
As a poet Djuna Barnes made her debut in 1915 with The Book of Repulsive Women, a collection of poems and Beardleyesque drawings of women in states of physical and moral degeneration.
In 1921 she was sent to Paris on an assignment and would remain there intermittently for the next fifteen years. She arrived with letters of introduction to Pound and Joyce, and soon entered the bohemian world of Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald. In Paris she became involved romantically with various ladies and gentlemen, including Nancy Cunard, Peggy Guggenheim, and Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven. In 1928 she met the great love of her life, the sculptor and silverpoint artist Thelma Wood. Although Djuna Barnes desired monogamy Thelma Wood was unfortunately somewhat wayward. Often Djuna Barnes would traipse from café to café searching for Miss Wood (who was usually “out on the pull”, gender no object) often ending up as drunk as her quarry. They finally separated in 1928, the same year in which Djuna Barnes produced the Ladies Almanack, an erotic pastiche and roman à clef of Parisian lesbian life. It was promptly banned by the US customs.
In 1931 Djuna Barnes went to England as the guest of Mrs Guggenheim, and stayed there until the outbreak of the Second World War. It was in England in 1936, with the help of TS Eliot, that she published her masterpiece, the novel Nightwood. The novel, written in poetic, stream-of-consciousness style, tells of the doomed homosexual and heterosexual loves of five damned characters, and is characterised by malevolent characters, dark humour, and a decidedly decadent flavour.
After Nightwood she produced only one major work, a surrealist verse play, The Antiphon (1958). In 1939 she returned to Greenwich Village, living off the charity again of Mrs Guggenheim. She became a recluse, spending the next forty years in her apartment refusing to see old friends and calling the police on young lesbians who came to pay their respects.
(A version of this post first appeared in The Chap magazine.)
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