SOURCE: "Light on Nightwood," in Nation, Vol. 261, No. 17, November 20, 1995, pp. 628-32.

[In the following review, Fleischer praises Phillip Herring's Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes for its accuracy, but complains that Cheryl Plumb makes too many assumptions about the editing of Barnes's Nightwood in her republication of the original version.]

We've never known what to do with our literary geniuses, particularly blasphemous parodists like Emily Dickinson (coy) and Gertrude Stein (mannish), who subvert gender conventions and radically alter literary forms—perhaps the former is prerequisite to the latter. Djuna Barnes is no exception.

Or is she? Unlike Dickinson and Stein, almost everything Barnes wrote that she considered complete was published in her lifetime, and her 1936 novel Nightwood has never since its 1946 reissue by New Directions been out of print. Then why, when Dickinson's stature matches Walt Whitman's and Stein's cachet supersedes Ernest Hemingway's, does the name Djuna Barnes—"the most famous unknown of the century," she dubbed herself—still evoke perplexed expressions? (Like Stein, who welcomed Hemingway in her rue de Fleurus salon but snubbed Barnes, she was an American expatriate in Paris during the 1920s.)

The first wave of feminist criticism largely passed Barnes by, but since her death in 1982, she has become a feminist cause célèbre: "Canonization" by male Modernists such as T. S. Eliot had been "[mis]appropriation," but "lesbian cult status" had minimized her; her brilliance had been underrated, but her work had also been "reduced to stylistics." In the midst of this maelstrom of contrary currents, the most vocal feminists extol Nightwood as the representative text of the "modernism of marginality" or of "sapphic modernism." Have these co-optings done right by Barnes?

They limit the appeal and therefore the readership for Barnes's work in ways that her work itself is not limited. They impute to Barnes politics she did not profess. Zealotry has spawned gross factual errors and irrational readings that have inflated within an insular critical field and emerged as full-blown myths. This has cheapened Djuna Barnes. It never would have happened in her lifetime. (Offended by Kenneth Burke's reading of Nightwood, Barnes told him off in several letters and withheld permission to quote.)

Both books under review are the products of extensive, painstaking research and go a long way toward correcting the factual errors that have so vexed Barnes scholarship in the thirteen years since she died, a week after her 90th birthday, in the company of a nurse, in a tiny Patchin Place apartment in Greenwich Village where for more than forty years she had increasingly withdrawn. Her early life was contrastingly lurid.

By the time Barnes was 5 years old, her father's mistress, Fanny Faulkner, had joined their household—which had relocated from Barnes's birthplace, Storm King Mountain, near Cornwall-on-Hudson, to a Huntington, Long Island, farm—and was producing half-siblings in tandem with mother Elizabeth, both women often pregnant at the same time, once giving birth twelve days apart. "Father and his bastard children and mistresses had thrown me off marriage and babies," Barnes wrote in 1938. In addition to helping care for her prodigal father's offspring, there were other pressures.

For years Barnes shared her father's mother's bed, and correspondence dating from when she was 13 years old is illustrated by grandmother Zadel with cartoons of breasts stretched out like penises and one nude woman atop another breast-to-breast. Here Phillip Herring provides fresh perspective, though he does so in a frustratingly mild manner:

It is not necessary to go as far as to argue, as Mary Lynn Broe does, that the Zadel-Djuna relationship was incestuous and therefore beneficial as a refuge against patriarchal violence. Broe confuses a number of issues. She says: "Temporarily safe from the violations of the patriarchal household. Zadel and Djuna played in their symbolic, marginalized world, a queendom of 'nanophilia.'"

Here Broe's jubilant "marginality" and "sapphism" crash through the looking glass where irrationality reigns. In a perverse double standard, a father's penis is patriarchal violence but a grandmother's breast stretched out like a penis is loving protection. In the six years since this piece was published no critic has ever in print pointed out that it is improper and injurious for any family member to press sexual needs on a child, physically or emotionally, actually or in pornographic cartoons. This is not a gender issue.

Aside from exhaustive archival research, Herring's Djuna has the benefit of fresh material provided by Barnes's "cooperative but cautious" family. The new material is a strength but gives rise to a persistent bias. For example, a later chapter describes Barnes's alcoholism after her return from Europe:

In March [1940], at their wits' end, her family sent her to a sanatorium in upstate New York, thus perpetrating what Djuna Barnes considered to be yet another violation of her person. Zendon [second of four brothers] had led her to believe she would be going to Arizona [where her friend Emily Coleman lived], then Saxon [third brother] brought her to Tratelja, on Diamond Point. Lake George. Outrageous! To Thurn [elder brother] she was just a "drunkard" who must be made to come to her senses. Nobody seemed sympathetic. Djuna contemplated revenge in a family biography.

Was deceptively luring Barnes to a sanatorium not a violation? (Once there, Barnes refused to "talk" to the psychiatrist, though she was amenable to discussing Proust.) Other of Herring's commentaries are downright puritanical. Regarding her first book of poems: "If one truly cared for Djuna Barnes, one would say very little indeed about The Book of Repulsive Women, for she and others often wished that these eight disgusting 'rhythms' accompanied by five drawings had never been published." Yet despite censorious residues. Djuna is a strong and in other respects generous biography: "This biography derives from a particular moment in time, when, in 1988, I was looking for more novels by women for my Modernism course. I wanted to teach Nightwood but felt frustrated by my futile efforts to understand it; before I could understand the novel, I believed, I had to understand Djuna Barnes." It is to be hoped that the modesty of his feminism will not be scoffed at. Herring spent seven years on this project, and with few exceptions he has gotten the facts right. While I frequently disagree with his assessments of Barnes's work. Herring has integrated her life and work persuasively, delivering a full-fledged critical biography and a fascinating read.

It was in Paris in the 1920s that Djuna Barnes fell in love with Thelma Wood—another American expatriate, a sculptor and silverpoint artist—because, Barnes would later say, Thelma reminded her of grandmother Zadel. "She was that terrible past reality," Barnes wrote in 1936, "over which any new life can only come, as a person marching up and over the high mound of a grave…. I have had my great love, there will never be another."

Barnes worried that after Nightwood, which she wrote about Thelma Wood, there would never be another great artistic achievement either. And there never was, not that great. Composing Nightwood was an arduous process undertaken during one of the most peripatetic periods of Barnes's life: six years of writing at least three versions, only to have her efforts repeatedly rejected on both sides of the Atlantic, including three rejections from the editor who had published three of her previous books. Then T. S. Eliot stepped in.

Eliot's role as Barnes's editor has been the single greatest controversy in Barnes criticism, which is why Cheryl Plumb's Original Version and Related Drafts is so important to scholars. Repeated assertions of Eliot's "text bashing" that "reduced Nightwood to a third of its original size" are immediately put to rest. Working from the version Eliot accepted for publication, Plumb restores eight pages of 139. Her introduction identifies several lobbyists for pruning the character Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante O'Connor's "raffish going on," as Barnes called it. The restored passages deepen our understanding of Nightwood. I do not think the restored version should supplant but should rather supplement the published one. I concur with T. S. Eliot's judgment here:

Not that the Doctor's conversation flags at all, but simply because I think that too much of it distorts the shape of the book. There is a good deal of the book besides the Doctor, and we don't want him to steal everything. [August 12, 1936, to Barnes. Emphasis added. Reprinted with permission of Valerie Eliot.]

Dr. O'Connor is one of the most flamboyant characters in literature, and one of the most poignant. He is a homosexual and transvestite, afflicted by being a woman trapped in a man's body. An illegal abortionist who haunts the pissoirs when looking for love, a liar and a thief, he is a glorious raconteur. Ultimately frustrated, all his speeches in the published version are meant to solace his variously afflicted friends. The restored speeches are without exception onanistic. Nor do they have, except in brief, the verbal and imagistic intensity of the published version. The following account of a visit to the palace of King Ludwig II ("the mad Wittelsbach"), a Roman Catholic and homosexual like O'Connor, comes closest:

Up there in the palace there's an attendant wandering the great empty rooms with their plush chairs and pillars, throne-room and ballroom (that seems like a terrific terminal and no trains coming in), who remembers him still and for a mark will tell you how he was his valet—and you look out of the corner of your eye to see if he knows what that might mean—and if he knew, if he remembers. He said the king was so tall that he himself, six foot three, had to stand on the tips of his shoes to get at his tie. So suddenly I myself rose on tip-toes, right in the middle of that great fine room, and whispered. "Was he large?" and it went echoing and bellowing through all those rooms like a great bull getting madder and madder the harder he ran; there had been no grandeur in that place for so long that echo couldn't be stopped. I stood there all dumbfounded, my eyes getting frightened, and he said, "Oh very!" but did he know what I meant or was he thinking of character? To draw his mind off I said in a little whisper. "Now my good man, where are the toilets? For dear's sake, I don't see so much as a toureen or a tea caddy, much less a pot."

"Lesen Sie österreichische Geschichte," he says, giving me a look of utter contempt. A bit of imperial and secret commode work I'll never know anything about.

There are many things we will never know about Nightwood: what transpired in three meetings between Barnes and Eliot in London during June of 1936 when most of the editorial decisions were made, what the early manuscripts of Nightwood were when whole. Cheryl Plumb's edition, which also appends all surviving pages of the early drafts, contains almost everything we can know.

Her textual notes and annotations are helpful, but the latter could have been more sumptuous and more accurate, Morpheus is not the "Greek god/personification of sleep" but one of the sons of old Somnus, able to assume the shape of any man, announcing a drowning in Ovid's Metamorphoses by appearing naked and dripping from the sea at the bedside of the bereft wife. "Girls that the dreamer has not fashioned himself to want, scatter their legs about him to the blows of Morpheus" has far more interesting connotations than the one implied by the mistaken identification. The care taken to "restore" Barnes's punctuation in the textual emendations is, really, much ado about not too much. Barnes herself edited different proofs differently, so Eliot's and proofreaders' corrections of her punctuation are nothing like the egregious bowdlerizations of Emily Dickinson's poems; yet they are treated as such. There is a related and equally questionable assumption underlying the commentaries on the restorations:

This three-page passage was deleted by Eliot, a deletion suggested by Coleman. In the margin of TSC2 Barnes had written [a note to Eliot], "From here to 32 can be cut if you think there are too many doctor's stories—see Coleman on other ms." The block has been included in this edition because letters to Coleman indicate her reluctance to have anything deleted, unless Eliot confirmed it. Presumably, then, she acquiesced in the decision, but regretted the deletion.

To say that Barnes regretted this and other deletions presumes too much. (There is not a shred of evidence in her subsequent correspondence that she did.) Besides, the interest of the restored passages needs no further justification. Why portray this as a rescue mission?

It comes down to the penis, I suspect; anatomy as critical destiny. Eliot has been reviled as the high priest of patriarchal Anglican High Modernism, and Barnes shall be rescued from him, whether she would or no. "We got on like a couple of priests with only one robe," Barnes wrote at the start of their alliance, which became a friendship that lasted thirty years. Must this be seen as a misalliance?

What are the consequences for the field of Barnes criticism, and consequently her readership, and consequently future alliances, literary and otherwise, that cross gender lines?

"A little-known genius," I now explain, whenever I mention Djuna Barnes and encounter yet another blank stare.