[In the following review, Dirda discusses Phillip Herring's Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes and the reprinting of Barnes's Nightwood.]

As it happens, a friend of mine lives in Patchin Place, the little courtyard in Greenwich Village where Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) spent the last 40-some years of her amazing life. Two decades ago, when Barnes was still alive, I used to think of ringing her doorbell and genuflecting or kissing her hand or presenting her with a bottle of Scotch. After all, she was one of the last surviving giants of 20th-century literature, author of the legendary Nightwood, and a woman who counted James Joyce among her drinking buddies and T. S. Eliot among her admirers. Make that fervent admirers: Eliot kept her picture above his desk (next to that of Yeats), addressed her as "dearest" in letters, and once declared her the greatest living writer.

Moreover, Eliot was hardly alone in his enthusiasm. Dylan Thomas used to read from Nightwood on his speaking tours of America. Samuel Beckett, whom Barnes scarcely knew, sent her part of the royalties from Waiting for Godot. Even Dag Hammarskjold, secretary general of the United Nations, valued her work so highly that he helped translate her versedrama, The Antiphon, into Swedish. Rumor has it that he was pulling strings to get her the Nobel Prize when his plane was shot down over Africa.

I never saw her, and doubtless she would have growled at me to go away even if she bothered to open the door. For most of her life Barnes was essentially a "cult" author, esteemed by a small coterie that kept Nightwood in print, savored the brocaded prose of her early autobiographical novel Ryder, and guffawed over the Rabelaisian lesbians of Ladies Almanack (its various ribald characters were based on Parisian notables like salon-keeper Natalie Barney, journalist Janet Flanner, and poets Romaine Brooks and Renee Vivien). In recent years, feminist scholars have begun to mine Barnes's work—the University of Maryland, which houses her papers, held a major conference a few years back. (Unfortunately, those talks, reprinted in a special issue of the Review of Contemporary Literature, are, for the most part, dully academic when comprehensible.) It is, thus, clearly the right time for both a good new biography and a modestly priced scholarly edition of Barnes's greatest prose work.

Phillip Herring, a Joyce expert by training, provides a straightforward chronological account of this once-neglected writer's family, friends and career. By comparison with the ill-organized, highly anecdotal 1983 life produced by Andrew Field (oft vilified—sometimes justly—for his early biography of Nabokov), Herring's work seems a little pedantic, the product of a sabbatical rather than the spillover from a passion. The phrase "thoroughly sound" comes irresistibly to mind and might normally be enough to sink the book, except for one small fact: If the soaps ever need any new plot lines, Djuna Barnes's life and work will supply plenty of naughty ideas.

For starters, Barnes's father, Wald, lived with wife, mistress and mother, not to mention assorted offspring, in a big, unhappy family. As a believer in the freest sorts of free love, Dad either raped the teenaged Djuna and/or gave her as a present to an elderly neighbor to deflower. Through most of her childhood the future author slept in the same bed with her grandmother and would seem to have engaged in some level of sexual play with the older woman (surprisingly graphic letters exist). At 17 she was even talked into a common-law marriage with a 52-year-old soap peddler. It only lasted a few months.

Not surprisingly, Barnes was happy to escape from her family to New York, where in the years just before and after World War I she became a well-paid, sought-after young journalist (and occasional illustrator, all too obviously in thrall to Aubrey Beardsley). In one stunt piece she described the ordeal of being force-fed through a tube shoved down her throat, a then common method for preserving the life of fasting suffragettes. Soon she was hanging out with the Provincetown Players, where she came to know Eugene O'Neill, John Reed and other bohemian notables. But, eventually, like so many of the artistically ambitious, the would-be novelist hied herself to Paris and the Left Bank, where she got to know … everybody, including Pound. Stein, Hemingway and Joyce—or Jim, as she was allowed to call him.

In her youth Barnes was a striking, if somewhat severe auburn-haired beauty, attractive to both men and women. Although most of her affairs were heterosexual, she always called Thelma Wood the central passion of her life. "I'm not a lesbian. I simply loved Thelma." The liaison lasted eight or so years, and when it was over, Barnes memorialized her lost love in a great work of lamentation, Nightwood. In prose of haunting musicality and splendor, she describes the havoc wreaked by Robin Vote, i.e., Wood, on the people who care for her. Here is the book's August and intricately wrought opening sentence:

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, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms,—gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician had predicted that she would be taken.

Barnes doesn't always write with such oracular, slightly humorous gravity; she can also be quite vulgarly funny, as when a character describes another "whipped with impatience, like a man waiting at a toilet door for someone inside who had decided to read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." In fact, most of the novel's grandest rhetorical flights belong to Dr. Matthew O'Connor, a drunken Irish Tiresias and advisor to the disconsolate, at once swishy, witty and pitiful. As O'Connor explains, "just being miserable isn't enough—you've got to know how." When Nora, the Barnes stand-in, complains about her loneliness, the doctor quickly one-ups her: "A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart." O'Connor is quite unforgettable, as are the book's starting final pages; Robin, always associated with beasts, is glimpsed in an abandoned chapel, down on her hands and knees, making strangely sexual overtures to her former lover's pet dog.

Shocking, confusingly structured, lyrical and haunting, Nightwood didn't precisely sell itself to prospective publishers. Indeed, Cheryl Plumb provides an enthralling account of its publishing history in her introduction to the novel's "original version," crediting Barnes's friend Emily Coleman with astute editorial advice and great cleverness in persuading T. S. Eliot to read the manuscript. Eliot, then working as an editor for the British publishers Faber and Faber, insisted on some 13 pages of cuts, which are here restored. In general, his editing "blurred sexual, particularly homosexual, references and a few points that put religion in an unsavory light. However, meaning was not changed substantially, though the character of the work was adjusted, the language softened." Besides presenting Barnes's original vision of her masterpiece, Plumb's edition also provides useful textual and explanatory notes, as well as reproductions of the surviving typescript pages.

Soon after Nightwood appeared in 1936 Barnes's life fell apart: She started to drink heavily, love affairs went sour, money nearly dried up. Back in New York she rented a small apartment on Patchin Place and settled down to years of crankiness, alcohol and writer's block. Perhaps not the normal kind of block, for she composed reams of poetry and worked sporadically on various projects, but it wasn't until 1957 that she was able to finish The Antiphon, a play that virtually no one could understand. Written in a kind of Elizabethan blank verse and reminiscent, by turns, of Waiting for Godot, The Family Reunion and Long Day's Journey into Night, this sorrowful drama builds on its author's unresolved anger toward her family, her persistent sense of betrayal and sexual exploitation. It ends with a mother crushing the skull of her Barnes-like daughter.

Barnes thought The Antiphon her masterpiece. Maybe. Sometimes it seems brilliantly Shakespearean in its diction, rhythm and syntax; at other times, it seems as kitschy as Ronald Firbank. In either case, I find it quite irresistible. What's a little thing like meaning compared to such word-music as this:

     Yet corruption in its deft deploy
     Unbolts the caution, and the vesper mole
     Trots down the wintry pavement of the prophet's head.
     In the proud flesh of the vanished eye
     Vainglory, like a standing pool,
     Rejects the thirsty trades of paradise.
     The world is cracked—and in the breach
     My fathers mew.

Elsewhere Barnes evokes her father "flanked by warming-pans, bassoons and bastards" and gives her murderous brothers these conspiratorial lines: "We'll never have so good a chance again; / Never, never such a barren spot, / Nor the lucky anonymity of war." I think a production of The Antiphon could be a triumph. Or a hoot.

Djuna Barnes died in 1982 one week after her 90th birthday. Even now, I wish that I had had the courage to ring her doorbell at No. 5, Patchin Place. Real creators, no matter how wayward their genius, deserve our thanks and our homage.