[In the following review, Robins discusses what the drawings in Poe's Mother: Selected Drawings of Djuna Barnes, edited by Douglas Messerli, say about society during Barnes's era.]

What is style besides being fashion's blood?—a distinctive look, a phrase evocative of a time, an attitude. Douglas Messerli's Poe's Mother: Selected Drawings of Djuna Barnes at first glance is replete with all of the above. Drawn tongue-in-cheek, a stylized Poe's mother as a slightly naughty vision of the 19th-century actress she was, adorns the book's elegant jacket cover and also occupies the next to last page of its more than a hundred drawings, including quick sketches, wood cuts, and black-and-white caricatures all displaying the professionalism and talent of a facile 1920s newspaper reporter/illustrator possessed of no coherent style except for an occasional out and out homage to Beardsley. These drawings were done to order for newspapers and the Theater Guild Magazine, and their chief appeal today lies in the fact that they were executed by the writer Djuna Barnes and, in turn, are the occasion for Messerli's exquisite explanatory notes, many of which end by serving up potent examples of the Barnes wit. And, as such, they have the charm, consistency, and staying power of an after dinner mint.

Douglas Messerli tells us in his introduction that. "The drawings of Djuna Barnes must be understood within the context of her other writings. In particular, her masterpiece Nightwood … in which Barnes creates a hierarchical world." In an effort to do justice to Poe's Mother, I took out my copy of Barnes's New Directions classic, published in 1937 reprinted in 1949, with endorsements on the jacket cover by Dylan Thomas calling it one of the three great prose works ever written by a woman" and an excerpt from T. S. Eliot's introduction that reads, "What I would leave the reader prepared to find is the great achievement of a style, the brilliance of wit and characterization." Today, rereading Barnes's masterpiece thirty years later, I find the book's brilliance something of a mixed bag. The novel begins in the 1890s and ends sometime in the 1920s. The first chapter, "Bow Down," introduces one of the book's secondary characters, Guido Volkein, a Jew of Italian descent, and his son Felix, both of whom read like characters who have wandered out of the 19th-century classic of anti-Semitism The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. On page three, Barnes's authorial voice tells us, "Guido lived as all Jews do, who, cut off from their people by accident or choice, find that they must inhabit a world whose constituents being alien, force the mind to succumb to an imaginary populace. When a Jew dies on a Christian bosom he dies impaled." As for Felix, Barnes tells us, "No matter where and when you meet him you feel that he has come from some other place—no matter from what place he has come—some country that he has devoured rather than resided in, some secret land he has been nourished on but cannot inherit for the Jew seems to be everywhere from nowhere." And three pages on, apropos of Felix, Barnes continues in this vein: "A Jew's doing is never his own, it is God's; his rehabilitation is never his own, it is a Christian's etc., etc."

Nightwood, a kind of Elizabethan classic of inversion, centers upon the history of an unhappy love affair between two women, Norah and Robin, which has masochistic overtones woven into the author's descriptions of the streets of Paris and Vienna, and a weird demimonde of circus performers mixing with a falsely titled European royalty. Male characters are secondary witnesses to the main drama of Robin and Norah's unhappy affair. The book's most important male character, Dr. Matthew O'Connor, is, I suspect, Barnes's answer to the genius of James Joyce. Dr. O'Connor, giving his take on a decadent Europe, speaks in a marvelous quasi-Elizabethan cadence. For example, he treats us to the following disquisition on race:

"The Irish may be as common as whale-shit—excuse me—on the bottom of the ocean—forgive me—but they do have imagination and," he added, "creative misery, which comes from being smacked down by the devil and lifted up again by the angels. Misericordioso! Save me, Mother Mary, and never mind the other fellow! But the Jew, what is he at his best? Never anything higher than a meddler—pardon my wet glove—a supreme and marvelous meddler often, but a meddler nevertheless." He bowed slightly from the hips. "All right, Jews meddle and we lie, that's the difference, the fine difference."

Barnes, born in upstate New York, was educated at home, one presumes by a fine Christian family, who evidently taught her prose cadences courtesy of the King James Bible. Barnes's sentences, as above and throughout the novel, have a unique rhythm as witnessed by Messerli's quotes from her early stories that accompany the drawings. As reproduced in Poe's Mother, aside from the newspaper quick sketches of Irvin Cobb, Marsden Hartley, James Joyce etc., Barnes's drawings all borrow from Art Nouveau with a soupçon of 19th-century illustration, and lack the individualism to achieve the level of becoming visual curiosities in the way Nightwood has achieved its status of literary curiosity and/or classic. For example, accompanying the Barnes heading "She had read to a world Ruled by Fairies," Barnes draws a stylized Japanese-type female figure with a fantastic hairdo emerging from the naked head of a sad aging woman. The drawing is, to say the least, flaccid compared to Barnes's accompanying note: "She was always finding herself in love with the hero and heroine of some novel. She came out of them into her own life with a little gasp of sorrow, and she went back into them with a sigh of content."

Djuna Barnes and T. S. Eliot were literary gods while I was growing up, and one ignored their matter and worshipped their manner or tried to. Thus, reading Poe's Mother and reexamining Nightwood is for me an act of reparation to a younger Jewish self who read and glossed over that book's content feeling at once confused, ashamed, and slightly afraid.

I am grateful, nevertheless, to Douglas Messerli for the dedicated professionalism with which he addressed the task of gathering and in some cases literally rescuing this material. The drawings in Poe's Mother allow us to examine from our own perspective the manners and mores adhering to the geniuses and instant celebrities of another era.