SOURCE: "'Bringing Milkshakes to Bulldogs': The Early Journalism of Djuna Barnes," in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, edited by Mary Lynn Broe, Southern Illinois University Press, 1991, pp. 27-34.

[In the following essay, Levine traces how Barnes's early journalism influenced her fiction, especially Nightwood.]

Judging by her early career as a journalist, one could say that Djuna Barnes had a taste for "the bawdy, cheap cuts from the beast life," not unlike her character Felix Volkbein of Nightwood, who haunts the dressing rooms of Europe's actresses, acrobats, and sword swallowers (N, II). Barnes combined the public demands of a career with a private fascination for the strange and bizarre. The assignments she drew as a "newspaperman" (her term) during the eight years before she left for Europe in 1920 led her inevitably to the grotesque. Barnes' tabloid journalism is elegant, witty, and surprisingly undated. Because her career as a journalist was the seedbed of her greatest novel, Nightwood, her early essays, interviews, and works of fiction are worth considering, setting aside questions of merit. The motif of the sideshow freak emerged from this early work and found its way into Nightwood.

In 1913 Djuna Barnes began working as a reported and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She free-lanced for the Press, the World, and the Morning Telegraph between 1914 and 1917, eventually writing for most of the other major New York papers. In addition to straightforward news reports, such as her page-one story for the Daily Eagle, "Stage Opens Case in New Delfer Trial" (1913), Barnes wrote interviews and feature articles on a startling variety of subjects. Tango dancers, chorus girls, Greenwich Village bohemians, and British suffragettes engaged her sharp-eyed, amused attention. She talked to out-of-work servant girls and to Lillian Russell in her opulent retirement. David Belasco the playwright, Diamond Jim Brady the financier, and Billy Sunday the evangelist responded to her questions with surprising openness and eloquence. Her early newspaper career kept her in touch with the popular entertainments of the 1910s—the circus, the vaudeville, the boxing ring, and the movies. Scattered among the big names she interviewed are these oddities: an Italian actress billed as "the Wild Aguglia," who kept monkeys in her dressing room; an "Indian" snake dancer named "Roshanara" (actually an English girl with a busy imagination); and a painless dentist. "Twingeless Twitchell," whose office was any Brooklyn street corner.

By 1917 Djuna Barnes was earning five thousand dollars a year as a free-lance feature writer. Fifteen dollars for an article was considered good payment in the 1910s; Barnes could, and often did, write several a day. By the time she left for Europe in 1920, she had published more than a hundred articles and over twenty-five short plays and fictions. The New York Tribune employed her as a stringer during her early years in Paris, Berlin, and the south of France. McCall's, Vanity Fair, Charm, and the New Yorker commissioned articles and interviews that featured personages famous, rich, or royal. McCall's editor, Harry Payne Burton, for example, sent Barnes a $500 check to a Barcelona address in 1925 for an article on international marriage among the elite.¹ During the 1920s, Barnes' popular journalism was an uncertain source of income, allowing her to publish her serious fiction and poetry in literary journals with small budgets. The Little Review, the Dial, and transition gladly took her work in return for the glory of the thing; occasional financial assistance from friends helped keep her afloat between checks.² From January 1929 to September 1931 she wrote articles and a gossipy monthly column, "Playgoer's Almanac" (retitled "The Wanton Playgoer"), for Theatre Guild Magazine. The big assignments became scarcer in the 1930s, however, and finally stopped altogether. But in the 1920s Barnes was known as a brilliant figure in literary and social circles on both continents. In May 1924 a young up-start named Ernest Hemingway warned the readers of the Paris-based Transatlantic Review that Djuna Barnes, "that legendary personality that has dominated the intellectual night-life of Europe for a century, is in town." It may well have been her reputation as a literary legend that finally ended her career as a popular journalist. By the late 1930s she had too much stature to write about what the crowned heads of Europe liked for dinner.

At the beginning of her career, however, there were few things Barnes would not do for the sake of a story, from risking the loss of "all dignity out of our lives as far back as our great grand uncles" on the slides, chutes, and whirling disks of Luna Park Steeple Chase to allowing herself to be lowered at the end of a rope from the top of a building for an article on firemen's rescues. Barnes' range in the 1910s was remarkably wide, but in almost every one of her light and engaging feature articles and interviews the real subject is the unexpected presence of the bizarre embedded in the everyday.

Sometimes the bizarre was not buried very deeply. For example, Barnes found Twingeless Twitchell, the dentist who pulled teeth for free, on a street corner in Brooklyn. The banner that headed her interview with Twitchell was the alliterative exuberance of a Coney Island "talker's" spiel: "Digital Dexterity of the Dental Demonstrator Holds Audience in Awe."³ The point of the article is that Twingeless Twitchell's act, however odd, is not tucked away in a freak show. One could encounter him or others like him on any municipal highway. One of Barnes' first assignments for the Daily Eagle was to explore the streets for "Types Found in Odd Corners Round about Brooklyn" (1913), as the heading for a series of her drawings proclaimed. Sometimes her searching eye picked out the unusual only to deflate it; in an interview with Ruth Royce, the comedienne, Barnes called her "the greatest 'nut' in vaudeville, eccentric beyond the limits of belief unless you have seen her."⁴ But more frequently her goal was to make the reader aware of the strange and contradictory nature of the quotidian world. If one could "live each day apart," she wrote in "Found in the Bowery" (1917), "then and only then should we see something at once beautiful and real and perhaps not beautiful at all."⁵

In these early pieces Barnes is flexing muscles she will use when she creates the characters of Nightwood. In a voice that recalls Dr. Matthew O'Connor's verbal dexterity, Dr. Twitchell declaims to his audience, "I'm the man that put the 'dent' in dentist and the 'ees' in teeth." O'Connor himself gives a good imitation of a medicine show spieler when he tells the café crowd, "I was standing listening to a quack hanky-panky of a medicine man saying: 'Now, ladies and gentlemen, before I behead the small boy, I will endeavour to entertain you with a few parlour tricks'" (N, 163). Barnes was particularly drawn to high-talking charlatans. When it came time to write the doctor's monologues, she had more than one prototype on whose mode of speech she could have drawn.⁶ The evangelist Billy Sunday may have suggested the doctor's favorite rhetorical device, attack by analogy. Side-stepping the question "Is war good or bad for religion?" Billy Sunday responds aphoristically: "Through ammunition one attains immunity: through battle one locates the knees. The eyes do not necessarily have to be acquainted with the Bible; the knees must be acquainted with the floor."⁷ The balanced repetition of the preacher's language ("through ammunition … through battle") is echoed in the doctor's speech: "we all go down in battle, but we all go home" (N, 129). To a certain extent, Barnes invented all the people about whom she wrote. Since she seldom took notes, she may have had to depend on the cadenced language of her Methodist background to recreate the ecclesiastical rhythms of Billy Sunday's oratory. Her memory was copious; as she told the actress Helen Westley during an interview, she could always "make a paragraph out of a note automatically." No doubt Barnes drew on her past for the interviews, as later she drew on the interviews for Nightwood.

Djuna Barnes also wrote about: a seal trainer in Brooklyn; the above-mentioned snake dancer, "Roshanara, the Reincarnation of the Ancient East"; and a baby gorilla at the Bronx Zoo named Dinah, whom she "interviewed."⁸ In words that Barnes, acting as "translator," put in Dinah's mouth, the "bush-girl" expresses a wish to try chewing gum so that she can find out "what it is that keeps so many people rotatory beneath their hats."

Most of Barnes' interviewees are in Dinah's position, at least some of the time, of having words—witty, alternately racy and orotund, but unmistakably Barnes' own—placed in their mouths. The Broadway producer Arthur Voegtlin, whom Barnes interviewed for the Press, sounds curiously like Billy Sunday, for example, and both men recall Dr. O'Connor. She even made a spokesperson out of Roshanara, whose verbal talents are rather unexpected coming from a snake dancer; "skill," Barnes remarks in Nightwood, "is never so amazing as when it seems inappropriate" (N, II). Addressing a stumbling American public, enamored of such violent, mechanical dances as the turkey trot and the bunny bug, Roshanara says: "Incidentally, you don't know anything about dancing. That's why my act is a risk; it is moonlight to madness, and it is dream steps to the death charge. It is a hazy, calm, peaceful interpretation of a calm, peaceful race. Well, it's like bringing a milkshake to a bulldog."

In these early essays Djuna Barnes is always trying to bring milkshakes to bulldogs. The attempt to confound her readers' blunted expectations by mixing modes and forcing incongruous juxtapositions is an essential part of her style, both as a writer and as an artist. The drawings that accompanied most of her articles and interviews are an improbable but successful combination of the daily funnies and Aubrey Beardsley. One of Barnes' specialties was the vamp, a type that had its vogue in the 1910s. The pages of popular magazines were filled with drawings of slant-eyed women, dressed in sinuous wraps and wearing the bland, standardized expressions of fashion models. Barnes eschewed anodyne effects; her females are anything but bland. A fashionably dressed woman in a typical Barnes sketch of this period goes for a walk with her pet, but the animal at the end of the leash is a cubistic chicken. Barnes' first published graphic work owes a debt to the whiplash linearity of art nouveau. The prose style she employed in her feature articles for the Daily Eagle and the Press is harder to categorize. The term "euphuistic" hardly does justice to the deliberate campiness of her description of an ice cream soda as "cheerful chemicals in chiffon." There is an element of Coney Island burlesque in such a contradictory construction that makes the usual critical terminology seem stuffy.

Coney Island, not unexpectedly, was another Barnes specialty. From 1913 to 1917 she wrote four articles about her visits to that garish, red-painted amusement park. Built in 1904, Coney Island was the inspiration of two alert showmen, Elmer S. Dundy and Frederick Thompson, who also built the Hippodrome, thereby making themselves sleek fortunes. Barnes was more interested in the people who visited and worked in Coney Island than she was in the park itself. The following passage is from a piece she wrote for the Press in 1914:

I heard emanating from one of the sideshows a noise that was half-way between a melody and a regret; there were also inside some torrid war cries and a glimpse of some turbans…. [The performers] had a lot of sheeting wound around them and a good many spears, which they occasionally threw at one another or at the crowd, or sometimes at a target which, in spite of the fact that they never do anything else, they never hit in the right place. They showed us how they cleaned their teeth, how they nursed their babies, and how they chewed gum.

The last exhibit was rather the best.⁹

In an essay that appeared in the Press three years later. Barnes' impressions are still as sharply focused, but her response to the sideshow has tilted from outside to inside, from the position of the observer to that of the observed:

A sideshow attracts attention. Great posters of the "Fattest Fat Lady," of the "Ossified Man," of the "Snake Charmer," and of that unfortunate fellow who has legs like whips and who is advertised as the "Cigarette Fiend." You look down upon these people as from the top of an abyss, they are the bottom of despair and of life. The demonstrator comes forward, cane in hand, he touches the nearest freak on the shoulder and begins turning him around as if this turning were all that the unfortunate had been born for. He begins to enumerate this man's misfortunes as though they were a row of precious beads.

An explosion in the mines, a falling of stones and coal, a man pitching forward in the darkness, a stumbling foot, a prayer to God, and then a pick through the body—"You see," he gives the young man another turn, tapping him upon the stomach, "here is where the pick thrust its head out." He smiles, rubbing his hands. The young man turns again, a fixed look upon his face, neither pleasant or otherwise, a cool self-possessed stare, a little uncertain, perhaps, whether to be proud or sorry for the accident that has made him of interest to the gaping throng.¹⁰

These two passages could be read as evidence that between 1914 and 1917 a development, a deepening of the character of their author, took place. Such things happen in fiction, if not in the fiction that Barnes happens to have written. Actually, these two passages illustrate two perspectives she had mastered from the start: an objective and a subjective approach to reporting.

Barnes, who began her career writing front-page news items, always retained the ability to record the facts of a story with detachment and economy. Sent to the Bowery in 1917 by the Telegraph to dig out hidden pockets of grand opera, she noticed the poisonous colors of the cakes in an Italian bakery and wondered about their effect on the digestion—without losing sight of her reporter's obligation to tell how, when, and where the public could attend a performance of Salome.

Her best journalism is subjective, however. She had what Louis Kannenstine called "a gift for uncommon observation."¹¹ The facts that mattered to her were the marginal, concealed, but vital details that allowed her to respond to the atmosphere of an assignment, to what one might call its psychological environment. Her essay on the playwright John Millington Synge is "an atmospheric article on an atmosphere."¹² The introduction contains an important demurral: "I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure." After this graceful hesitation, we are offered a selection of homely vignettes: the Irish playwright cooking a frugal meal of tea and eggs on a small stove, wandering alone in the windy dusk, playing the penny whistle for a few friends. Perhaps these are made-up "facts"—in any case, details no "critic" would find important. But they create the illusion of a presence, palpable and intense, that owed little of its effect to the historical facts, arranged in chronological order, around which her essay is discreetly constructed. Barnes has evoked an atmosphere of loneliness, detachment, and mystery. Most of the feature articles she wrote between 1913 and 1919 have a similar subjectivity.

Barnes' Synge is sad and a bit rumpled; in spite of his celluloid collar and his lyric genius, he resembles the tramps, barflies, and laid-off workers she sketched in the "Types Found in Odd Corners" series she did for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1913. Above the high-flown caption "Because the Road He Took Was Wrong," a man in a rough cap and jacket sits in a chair with his face hidden in the crook of his arm. Barnes gave the same posture of weary suffering to a young prostitute whom Nora encounters after she and Robin are separated (N, 157). Such outcasts of society are valuable, we are told, although "their good is incommunicable, outwitted, being the rudiment of a life that has developed, as in man's body are found evidences of lost needs" (N, 52). Nightwood is a gathering of the distressed, people she terms "détraqués"—O'Connor's "Tuppeny Upright," the boys and girls who hang around public toilets at night, the freak Mademoiselle Basquette, "built like a medieval abuse," and, above all, Dr. O'Connor himself. As a journalist, Barnes learned how to communicate the incommunicable good inherent in such people by studying the workers and actors she found on the margins of social "acceptability."

If much of Djuna Barnes' early newspaper work is "subjective journalism" rather than straight reportage, it was mainly because there was a demand for that work at which she, above others, excelled. She had, however, a reputation for reportorial energy and toughness, as well. "Djuna Barnes, the femme writer," Walter Winchell wrote in the late 1920s, "can hit a cuspidor twenty feet away." That particular talent belonged to someone else, but Barnes had earned the reputation. "Baby Face" Nelson and his girl friend gave her an interview at her Waverly Place apartment while nervous bodyguards patrolled the doors and windows. Once she climbed into an upstairs window to photograph the body of a murdered girl. She snapped the picture but failed to get an interview with the distraught father, who threw her out the first time she tried to enter the house. "This was the kind of thing that made me get out of the newspaper business," Barnes told a friend more than sixty years later. Between 1916 and 1918 her flow of articles diminished considerably. What ended her career as a news reporter (but not as a journalist) was her refusal to divulge to her editor the facts about a rape case she had investigated. He fired her on the spot.¹³

Barnes also earned her living by describing to a sedentary public how it felt to be a carefree young vamp, a comic or satiric persona she donned in the 1920s when she signed the pseudonym "Lydia Steptoe" to articles she wrote for Vanity Fair, Charm, and Shadowland. For a few years she gave it her all, until the role must have sickened her. Coming briefly out of deep seclusion in 1971 to give Henry Raymont of the New York Times an interview, she said: "Years ago I used to see people. I had to, I was a newspaperman, among other things. And I used to be rather the life of the party."¹⁴ It is tempting to imagine a moment when, her bravado faltering, Barnes felt like the young man with the perforated stomach, "a little uncertain perhaps whether to be proud or sorry for the accident" that made her of interest to the throngs. But this is impertinent speculation. Her own terse words to Raymont will have to suffice: "I used to be invited by people who said, 'Get Djuna for dinner, she's amusing.' So I stopped it."

Barnes discovered fairly early that "subjective journalism" could be made to serve the needs of a personal and artistic, as well as a professional, integrity. The account of her experiment with force-feeding, which she wrote for the World Magazine in 1914, is graphically detailed, but it is not coolly detached. Her goal is to inspire the readers of the Sunday supplement with a sense of outrage on behalf of English suffragettes on a hunger strike. She writes: "If I, play-acting, felt my being burning with revolt at this brutal usurpation of my bodily functions, how they who actually suffered the ordeal in its acutest horror must have flamed at the violation of the sanctuaries of their spirit?"¹⁵ "Empathy" has rarely been taken further by any writer.

For the average reader, the man who earned his living by displaying his perforated stomach in a sideshow would have seemed no more of a freak than the suffragette willing to risk having a tube forced into hers. What Barnes is looking for in her early pieces is a way to narrow the distance between the freakish unfortunates she encountered in "odd corners" of the city and the audience who "look[s] down upon these people as from the top of an abyss." One way is to enter the abyss herself. Thus she allowed the prison doctors and nurses to strap her to the infirmary table: "This," she thought quizzically as she looked up into their faces, "is one picture that will never go into the family album." Another way is to produce snapshots of the event that turned a human being, like ourselves, into a freak: "a stumbling foot, a prayer to God, and then a pick through the body." The world she introduces by these means is alien and threatening, but full of fascination. Unable to turn away, one experiences direct contact with the grotesque.

During the years she wrote for the daily papers, Barnes developed an eye for the diamond embedded in slug's meat. James Joyce, whom she met in Paris, told her, "A writer should never write about the extraordinary; that is for the journalist."¹⁶ Fortunately, she was not that kind of journalist. Her extraordinary fact was almost always buried in the heart of the everyday, whether she was writing about the strange people she met in Greenwich Village and the Bowery, the circus acts at the Hippodrome, or the freak shows at Coney Island.

Nightwood is proof that Barnes absorbed, retained, and used what she had seen as a newspaper writer. The most obvious echo from her past is that collection of circus performers with suggestive names—the trapeze artist Frau Mann, for example, known onstage as "the Duchess of Broadback"—whose presence on the novel's periphery caused some early reviewers to label the book "a sideshow of freaks," to T. S. Eliot's dismay. Barnes would not have tried to duck the phrase. Frau Mann, after all, is "eccentric beyond the limits of belief unless you have seen her."

The word "freaks" appears nowhere in Nightwood. That Barnes would refrain from using the term marks a change in her attitude towards the use to which subjective journalism might be put. In some of her early work, she clearly itches to force the complacent to acknowledge their affinity with anomalous, marginal people. By the time she wrote Nightwood, the teacher had become an author without ceasing to be a humanist. Barnes herself would "never use the derogatory in the usual sense" (a "great virtue" she shared with Dr. O'Connor [N, 116-17]): she seems, rather, to have decided to trust her audience to summon up similar powers of discrimination. "Freaks," to be sure, is a word that recoils upon the reader who would use it for the nonheterosexual characters in Nightwood. If some still do, that fact only proves that Barnes continues to bring milkshakes to bulldogs, even though the "milkshake" has turned to headier stuff.

notes

1. Harry Payne Burton, letter to Djuna Barnes, 2 November 1925, the Djuna Barnes Collection, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, College Park.

2. Matthew Josephson, in Life among the Surrealists, a Memoir (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1962), 83, recalls that at one period Barnes was living on a monthly stipend of fifty dollars, given to her by a rich American woman (probably Natalie Clifford Barney).

3. "'Twingeless [sic] Twitchell' and His Tantalizing Tweezers, etc.," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 27 July 1913, 6.

4. "Ruth Royce, Greatest 'Nut' in Vaudeville," New York Press, 19 May 1915, sec. 4, p. 4.

5. "Found in the Bowery: The Italian Drama," New York Morning Telegraph, 21 January 1917, sec. 2, p. 1.

6. The prototype usually cited for Dr. Matthew O'Connor is Dr. Dan Mahoney. For accounts of this friend of Barnes' expatriate years, see John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970); Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968); and Andrew Field, Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes (New York: Putnam's, 1983).

7. "Billy Sunday, a Fire-Eater in Pulpet, etc.," New York Press, 12 February 1915, sec. 5, p. 2.

8. "Training Seals in Stage Stunts, etc.," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 31 August 1913, 30; "Roshanara, a Wraithlike Reincarnation of the Ancient East," New York Press, 14 June 1914, sec. 5, p. 3; "The Girl and the Gorilla; Dinah at the Bronx Zoo etc.," New York World Magazine, 18 October 1914, 9.

9. "If Noise Were Forbidden at Coney Island, a Lot of People Would Lose Their Jobs etc.," New York Press, 7 June 1914, sec. 5, p. 5.

10. "Surcease in Hurry and Whirl," New York Morning Telegraph, 15 July 1917, 2.

11. Louis Kannenstine, The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1977), 5-6.

12. "The Songs of Synge: The Man Who Shaped His Life as He Shaped His Plays," New York Morning Telegraph, 18 February 1917, 8.

13. I am indebted to Hank O'Neal's memoirs (excerpted in this volume) for Barnes' account of her newspaper experiences and for her denial of Walter Winchell's "spittoon" anecdote.

14. Henry Raymont, "From the Avant-Garde of the '30's, Djuna Barnes," New York Times, 24 May 1971, 24.

15. "How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed," New York World Magazine, 6 September 1914, sec. 5, p. 17.

16. "Vagaries Malicieux," Double Dealer 3 (1922): 253; reprinted in Vagaries Malicieux: Two Stories by Djuna Barnes (New York: Frank Hallman, 1974).