From My Commonplace Book

"I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard." - Raymond Chandler Philip Marlowe's Guide to Life.

Neglected Authors - Djuna Barnes

"There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole." – Djuna Barnes
 
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.)

Neglected Authors - Henri de Monfreid

Henri de Monfreid was born in France in 1879, the son of a painter and art dealer who was friends with Gauguin and Matisse. After schooling, de Monfreid was judged unfit for military service and spent ten years working variously as a chauffeur, chemist and milkman. 
 
In 1911 aged 32 he settled in Djibouti (then a French possession) where he became a trader in coffee and hides. Tiring of the petit-bourgeois colonial life, he travelled into the Ethiopian interior, becoming friends with the Danakil tribe, and learning their language. He also converted to Islam, adopting the name Abd-al-Hai (“slave of life”). After his travels he built himself a dhow, the “Altair”, and between 1912 and 1940 he earned a raffish living on the Red Sea diving for pearls and sea-slugs, gun-running, and smuggling hashish. Needless to say, he also had several spells in prison. During the World War I he also spied for the French, his knowledge of the various anchorages in the Red Sea and Horn of Africa proving invaluable.
 
In the 1930s, de Monfreid began writing about his adventures, publishing several books such as Secrets of the Red Sea and Adventures on the Sea. His book Towards the Hostile Lands of Ethiopia incurred the displeasure of Emperor Haile Selassie, who expelled him from Ethiopia in 1933, although he later returned after Mussolini’s conquest. During World War II he worked for the Italians until he was captured by the British, who deported him to Kenya. After the war he retired to France where he quietly raised a plantation of opium poppies until this was discovered by the authorities. He narrowly escaped prosecution, and settled down to a life of writing, turning out over 70 books over the next 30 years. His books reflect his peripatetic life and thirst for action and violent adventure. As well as travel books, he also wrote several novels such as The Slave of the Golden Boat, and Abdi, the Man With the Severed Hand.

His most famous and best book is the non-fictional Hashish: Smuggling Under Sail in the Red Sea (1935), a classic yarn about a smuggling trip. He makes the acquaintance of a Greek sailor in Marseille who seems to regard the buying of hashish as a perfectly normal activity, and gives him the address of his family in Greece who happen to own a farm in the mountains. With the help of a local bishop, he avoids the Greek customs, and sails via Djibouti to Suez with his narcotic cargo. On the way he is attacked by Eritrean soldiers who he scares away by letting off dynamite, and is chased by the Italian navy. On arrival in Suez, he contacts some Bedouin who help him smuggle the hashish into the desert.

 
During barren periods, when writing was not bringing in enough money, he sold off his father’s collection of Gaughin’s paintings. Only after de Monfreid’s death in 1974 were these discovered to be fakes…

 

(A version of this post first appeared in The Chap magazine.)