[In the following review. Seymour asserts that while "[Barnes] has been partly revealed [in Phillip Herring's Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes]: a bigger and bolder exposure is still needed."]

Few authors have achieved so much celebrity with one novel as the elegant, exotic Djuna Barnes, without whom no account of Greenwich Village in the teens, or the Left Bank in the 1920's, is complete. That one novel was Nightwood. Overwritten and self-indulgent, it carries off its flaws with splendid nonchalance. Admired by Joyce, Nightwood is as important to the history of the 20th-century novel as Finnegans Wake—and more readable.

It was published in 1936, when Barnes was 44 and still overwhelmed by the departure of her lover, Thelma Wood. Wood appears in the book as the elusive, promiscuous Robin Vote, reduced in the final chapter to letting herself be seduced at an altar by a dog. Barnes never makes clear whether Robin is obsessed by self-degradation or simply reverting to her instinctive level; throughout the novel, Barnes stresses the narrowness of the line between humankind and animals. A circus girl catches the eye of a dilettante aristocrat, not for her beauty but because he relishes her similarity to the lion she tames. The grotesque cabaret performers who act as a chorus and audience in the book are "gaudy, cheap cuts from the beast life, immensely capable of that great disquiet called entertainment."

The aristocrat, Baron Felix Volkbein, languid, melancholy and preoccupied with the history and culture of nobility, was Barnes's private nod to Proust. The character of Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor owed everything to the extraordinary raconteur and abortionist Daniel A. Mahoney. In his biography, Djuna, Phillip Herring has much to say about her friendship with Mahoney and the care with which she recorded his pronouncements in her notebooks. In Nightwood, the funny, horrifying monologues of Dr. O'Connor seem at first no more than a device to unify the wandering narrative. A closer reading shows that O'Connor uses his fantastic imagination to keep reality at bay. His outpourings are a lifeline he throws to his desperate friends. When, finally, he goes mad, he does so recognizing that he has failed to save them from themselves. "I've not only lived my life for nothing, but I've told it for nothing," he whispers for his own grim epitaph.

T. S. Eliot, who edited Nightwood, was the first to notice the significance of O'Connor's role. But readers hoping to discover from the Dalkey Archive Press edition more about Eliot's contribution to the book are in for a disappointment. In a 75-page appendix, the editor, Cheryl J. Plumb, who teaches English at Pennsylvania State University, includes some unpublished drafts from the original 670-page manuscript, but the 1995 Nightwood is unexcitingly close to the 1936 version. Most of the emendations are picky; a few are revealing, but at the end of the day I shall continue reading my old copy of Nightwood, not least because the long, cramped, asterisked lines of the annotated edition hide the flow of a prose that stands at the brink of poetry.

Mr. Herring, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is, astonishingly, only the second biographer of Barnes. (The first was Andrew Field.) His book is less gossipy and more reliable than its predecessor, but the reader is still left with an awful lot of questions about their witty, beautiful, difficult subject.

Barnes's novel was only slightly more bizarre than her life. Her father, Wald, treated procreation as a religious duty and went on riding expeditions with a sponge to clean himself up after random sexual encounters. At home, his wife and children lived with his mistress and his second brood.

Wald, a weak man, was authorized to live in this way by his remarkable mother, Zadel, a spiritualist who believed in free love. Correspondence between Zadel and her granddaughter suggests that she and Djuna may have had an incestuous relationship. Certainly Barnes worshipped her. "I always thought I was my grandmother, and now I am almost right," she wrote in 1935. There are hints in her work that she thought her father had raped her, but Mr. Herring concludes that Wald is more likely to have acted as a spectator after procuring her for a friend. With Zadel's support, Barnes fled home at the age of 17 in 1909 to live—for two months—with a middle-aged suitor. At 21, she arrived in Greenwich Village.

Nightwood led many of Barnes's admirers to suppose she was an evangelist for lesbianism. Given that the novel was devoted to an obsessive love affair between two women, Lady Ottoline Morrell could hardly be blamed for writing to praise Barnes's courage in defending same-sex love. Barnes was furious. She had never regarded herself as a lesbian. Her first great love affair was with Ernst Hanfstaengl, the grandson of a Yankee general in the Civil War, to whom she was engaged from 1914 in 1916. His rejection of Barnes as an unfitting mother for his German child was painfully recorded in a section deleted from Nightwood that is included in Ms. Plumb's edition.

In 1921, some months after being sent to Paris on a lucrative commission for McCall's magazine, Barnes met and fell in love with Thelma Wood, a tall, seductive woman to whom all the pleasure was in conquest. Vanquished, Barnes condemned herself to eight years of trailing after Wood through a variety of bedrooms and bars. Wood was an alcoholic; Barnes took to drink for solace and did not shake the habit until she was almost 60. By then, Thelma had been exorcised in Nightwood, and Barnes was ready to embark on her most autobiographical work, The Antiphon. Dag Hammarskjold thought enough of this curious play to arrange a Swedish premiere; Eliot, who published it, contributed a blurb (later withdrawn), noting that "never has so much genius been combined with so little talent." Barnes, who acknowledged only the genius, was understandably displeased.

Next to Baron Corvo, it is hard to think of a writer who so ferociously bit every extended hand. As Mr. Herring notes, Peggy Guggenheim, Barnes's most consistent supporter, was regularly informed that the rich had a duty to provide for great writers, who in turn could do as they pleased. To Guggenheim's credit, she remained unwaveringly supportive. Eliot also remained helpful and affectionate: some of the most intriguing pages of Djuna concern Barnes's friendship with his second wife, Valerie, and describe a 1969 reunion arranged by her between the elderly Barnes and a former admirer, Ezra Pound. The account is Mrs. Eliot's own, and it conveys the quality in Djuna Barnes that gives Mr. Herring the most trouble—her wit.

Barnes's elegant asperity was legendary. Her wit was of the spontaneous, topical, punning kind, which does not convert to reported speech. Sadly, in trying to celebrate it, Mr. Herring only leaves us wondering how anybody could have laughed at such weak jokes. But laugh they did. Joyce, who greatly influenced Barnes's style, was devoted to her. Samuel Beckett was fond enough to send a check for $3,400 when she was short of money. Her photograph was one of the five Eliot kept in his Faber & Faber office.

One of Barnes's blacker observations was that at the age of 75 she had become "the most famous unknown of the century." To younger writers, obscurity seemed to have been her choice. When she died 15 years later, in 1982, she was best known as a poverty-stricken recluse. Mr. Herring does valuable work in reassessing this image. Barnes was neither so poor nor so misanthropic as has been supposed. Approached with several lucrative offers for the film rights to her work, she lost them only by insisting on total personal control of the productions. She could afford to be highhanded. The sale of her papers in 1972 to the University of Maryland had been profitable: she had some $180,000 in the bank. A series of young men (including Mr. Field, the first biographer) readily consented to act as her secretaries, her shoppers and—most important to a woman who delighted in talking—her audience. Her nurses, however, left in droves, unable to bear her insults.

"Nothing is so abominable as a sweet old lady," Barnes wrote in Nightwood. There was no danger of her becoming one. "Make sure they pay you!" was one of her last recorded comments (to a young illustrator) before her death.

Enjoyable though Mr. Herring's biography is, I have reservations about it. We are told far too much about Barnes's friends and acquaintances, even when they have only a faint connection to her; they are the pillars and supports of a book in which the main figure is only glimpsed as a shadow flitting from arch to arch. It is particularly frustrating to find that the last 30 years of her life have been so hastily dismissed. It is as if, having reported on the failure of The Antiphon in 1958. Mr. Herring had reached the limits of his interest. Yet Barnes wrote poems until almost the end of her life, and she was, as Mr. Herring clearly indicates, not a wholehearted hermit. She has been partly revealed here; a bigger and bolder exposure is still needed.