THE LIBRARY MOVES UPTOWN:
Djuna Barnes
Nightwood
(1937)
"Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein - a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed of a rich spectacular crimson, the valance stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin on which...stood the Volkbein arms - gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken."
She has been described as vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic and a little mad. Walter Winchell once commented that she could "hit a cuspidor twenty feet away." The lady in question is Djuna Barnes whose experimental novel Nightwood established her as a cult figure more sapphic than straight. Barnes, who moved in modernist and surrealist circles here and abroad, was not known for the clarity of her prose. In the words of one critic she was "more revered than read." Even T.S. Eliot, who wrote the introduction to the American edition of Nightwood, confessed that it took him "some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole."
Nightwood, dedicated to Peggy Guggenheim and John Ferrar Holms, involves five disturbed characters living in Paris whose lives intersect in the tortured realms of night and sleep. In a half-compliment, Dylan Thomas described the novel as "one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman." Its qual- ity of horror, according to Eliot, brings to mind Elizabethan tragedy. Barnes liked the title because "it makes it sound like night-shade, poison and night and forest..."
Barnes's penchant for the obscure and complex stemmed from her unorthodox past. As a child she lived in Cornwall-on-Hudson with her parents, her father's mistress, many children from both beds and her suffragette grandmother, who had held an avant-garde salon in London in the 1880s. Barnes's milieu left her with a distinct aversion to the American middle-class, which she described as having "mink-trimmed minds and seal-edged morals." Steering clear of such noxious influences, Barnes ran with the cutting-edge crowd in Greenwich Village until she decamped for Paris. She studied art, took many lovers and also for a time was a member of this Library. In
Books and People, a history of the New York Society Library, Marion King described Barnes as an "intense dark-eyed member of the writers of the Nineteen-teens."
In the early 1930s, Barnes, ravaged by a destructive personal life, declared there was "nothing left but a big crowd" on the Left Bank. By 1939 she had returned to New York City where she spent the rest of her life. Barnes describes this as her "Trappist period." E.E. Cummings, her neighbor at Patchin Place in Greenwich Village, would call out of his window, "Are you still alive, Djuna?" Among Barnes' admirers were Samuel Beckett, Anäis Nin and Dag Hammarskjöld.
ABOUT THE DESIGN OF "NIGHTWOOD"
Robert Josephy (1903–1993) was one of the great American book designers and typographers of the 1930s and 1940s. He is known for a design style that was clean and straightforward. His typography was equally pure, the antithesis of baroque. Josephy, who worked for Alfred A. Knopf until 1925, left his mark on books by T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.
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