I AM
ALIEN TO LIFE : SELECTED STORIES
By
Djuna Barnes
McNally
Editions. 219 pages. £12.99. ISBN 978-1-96134-122-7
Reviewed by Jim Burns
Djuna
Barnes is perhaps best known for a single book, Nightwood, published in
1936, and assuring her of a place in the history of literary modernism. What are
less well-known are her short stories, many of which appeared in various
newspapers and magazines over the years. Some were collected in Smoke and
Other Early Stories (Virago, London, 1985), and now we have a different
selection, with three exceptions which are in both books, to provide a wider
look at what Barnes wrote.
She was
born in 1892 in Cornwall-on-Hudson, an artist’s colony north of New York. Her
father, an artist, was American, her mother, a writer, English. Another version
of her father describes him as “a wandering American fiddler and horse breeder,
a man who believed in free love and trafficked freely in cruelty”. She was
largely educated by her parents, and at some point in the early-1900s went to
New York to study at the Platt Institute and the Arts Students League. If she
had an aptitude for art, she was also a talented writer and by 1913 was a
regular contributor to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, She provided her own
illustrations for the stories she wrote.
Barnes published her first poetry collection, The Book of Repulsive
Women, in 1915. She also had a short-lived marriage, and began to associate
with writers and others in Greenwich Village. She was involved with the
Provincetown Players, published in The Little Review, and knew
Village celebrities like Edmund Wilson, Guido Bruno, Berenice Abbott, and the
eccentric Baroness Freytag von Loringhoven.
In 1921
(some reports say 1919) she went to Paris where she met and mixed with James
Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, all later to become famous.
But Paris was awash with writers in the 1920s, including the novelist Emily
Holmes Coleman (author of The Shutter of Snow) and the poet Mina Loy.
Barnes also encountered the artist Thelma Wood. with whom she was to have
a long-running love affair. Both Wood and Emily Holmes Coleman appear in
Nightwood under different names. Merve Emre, in the informative introduction
to I am Alien to Life, says that Barnes returned to New York in 1939,
“alone and destitute”. And published little after that until her death in 1982.
Phillip
Herring, in his Djuna : The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (Penguin Books,
Harmondsworth, 1996) says that she published “some forty-five short stories”. If
my calculations are correct thirty-one of them appear in either Smoke or
I am Alien to Life. Herring mentions that she “had written for
The Little Review, Dial, Charm, The Smart Set, Vanity Fair, McCall’s,
Transatlantic Review, transition, and other magazines”. His biography
usefully lists the stories with their original publication details.
Looking
through a couple of books I have to hand, Barnes’s story “Ducie” was in
American Esoterica, a curious limited edition collection “Privately
published by Macy-Masius Publishers”, New York, in 1927. Was that its first
publication? Its lesbian-inclined subject-matter set it alongside Robert
McAlmon’s “Distinguished Air”, about the gay community in 1920s Berlin, and
Nathan Asch’s “Business”, about an encounter with a prostitute. And Barnes’s
“The Little Girl Continues” was in Americans Abroad, edited by Peter
Neagoe (The Servire Press, The Hague, 1932), where her friends Emily Holmes
Coleman and the Baroness Else von Freytag Loringhoven also appeared. It might be
worth noting that “The Little Girl Continues” is in I am Alien to Life
under the title, “The Grande Malade”. Incidentally, a point that might interest
bibliographers is that Herring’s listing of the stories indicates that
“Cassation”, (formerly “A Little Girl Tells a Story to a Lady”), a particularly
fine piece written, like “The Little Girl Continues”, in monologue form, and,
according to Herring, first published in This Quarter, edited by Ethel
Moorhead and Ernest Walsh, was also in Americans Abroad. It wasn’t.
Setting
aside the novel Nightwood, not many of Barnes’s stories directly involve
the American expatriate community in Paris. There is one, “Behind the Heart, in
I am Alien to Life, which does make direct references to the city
: “It was in Paris, Madame, and in the autumn and in the time of rain.
For weeks, days and nights for weeks it had been raining. It was raining under
the trees, and on the Avenues, and over the houses and along the Seine, so that
the water seemed too wet; and the buttresses of churches and the eaves of houses
were weeping steadily; clinging to the angles, endlessly sliding down went the
rain”. Herring says that this story, which was only published posthumously in
1993, relates to Barnes’s short-lived affair with Charles Henri Ford, the poet
and editor of the avant-garde Blues: The Magazine of New Rhythms, and the
author, with Parker Tyler, of the classic gay novel, The Young and Evil,
published by the Obelisk Press in Paris in 1933. According to Herring, “The
story takes place in Paris during a week in the late summer of 1931, when she
was thirty-nine and he twenty-one”.
Some
others are certainly placed in the city, but the characters involved, and their
environments, seem to owe as much to Barnes’s imagination as to any
easily-identifiable persons and places. But perhaps the locations don’t matter
too much and it’s the people and their foibles and fancies that are central to
the stories? In “Spillway”, a woman suffering from TB returns after a long spell
in a sanatorium with a child she has conceived while away. She attempts to
explain to her husband the circumstances that led to her having a liaison with
someone else. He fails to understand, and the story ends on a bleak note. In “A
Night Among the Horses”, Freda Buckley, “that small fiery woman with a battery
for a heart and the body of a toy, who ran everything, who purred, saturated
with impudence, with a mechanical buzz that ticked away her humanity”, appears
to drive a man to his destruction.
And in
“Indian Summer”, Madame Boliver “at the age of fifty-three was young again…..she
blazed into a riotous Indian Summer of loveliness. She was tall and
magnificent”. Her life expands and she starts a salon : “Poets and musicians,
litterateurs and artists, experimenting in the modern, grouped themselves about
her mantels like butterflies over bonbons and poured sentiment upon sentiment
into her ears”. She attracts an admirer, Perkoff, a somewhat opportunistic,
down-at-heel Russian, and orders “a large stock of wine and cakes for the
wedding party”. All seems well, “And then one day she died”. Perkoff looks at
her lying in the coffin. “Damn it’ he said, putting his fingers into his vest”.
Reading
Barnes’s stories I was occasionally put in mind of Mary Butts, and the stories
she published in Speed the Plough (1923) and Several Occasions
(1932), mostly I think because of the over-riding tone of ironic detachment. Or
is it the shared interest in the offbeat? Barnes knew Butts during her days in
Paris and London. Here’s what Oswell Blakeston said about Butts in the
“Overlooked and Underrated” issue of Little Caesar (Los Angeles, 1981) :
“Mary’s novels, with their strange blendings of intellectual witchcraft, of
heightened perception, of sympathy for the dwellers in Wasteland (the army
deserters, the aging homosexuals, the women who want to work evil but have not
the spells) would surely intrigue again”.
In
Barnes’s “The Terrorists” two would-be revolutionaries “lived in a dismal little
garret high above the rest of the sad houses of the shabby side street. The
building had once been some kind of church or house of devotion, but had long
ago been turned into rooms, and was now frequented by a vocalist, a violin and
piano teacher, and a few out-at-knee artists”. They and others like them drink,
argue, and plot, but achieve little. The main character, Pilaat, a one-time
poet, fulminates against the world’s injustices, and falls asleep. When his wife
wakes up it’s midday. The men are still sleeping : “She looked out of the window
again. It was a splendid day. She thought of her favourite café, and she smiled
as she contemplated one or two new phrases she would use in relation to life.
She put Pilaat’s book in her pocket. The coffee began to boil”.
I was
particularly taken with a story called “The Perfect Murder” in which a professor
kills and dismembers a woman who has suddenly appeared from out of nowhere, and
with whom he at one point discusses marriage, only to see her looking at him
from the window of a taxi later that day. It’s a fantasy, much in the line of
Robert M. Coates’s Dada-influenced novel, The Eater of Darkness (1926)
or Michael Fessier’s Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind (1935), and
is enlivened by some bizarre exchanges in the dialogue, where the professor and
the woman appear to be talking totally at cross-purposes.
Nothing is real, little can be relied
on. It might appear to be something of an oddity among the rest of the stories,
but it fascinated me.
Merve
Emre in the introduction to I am Alien to Life, says that “Plot is not
Barnes’s strength”, and that’s true enough. It doesn’t matter because her work
can easily depend on its attributes, such as dialogue, narrative flow, sly
humour, and imaginative description. There is also a suggestion that “no doubt
Barnes borrows many of her furnishings from the writers of the fin-de-siecle”.
This is perhaps not surprising. Like many of her generation – she was born in
1892, Mary Butts in 1890, Margaret Anderson in 1886 - she would have grown up
probably reading writers like Oscar Wilde, Henry Harland, George Egerton, and
Ella D’Arcy, to name just a few of the so-called decadents, and would no doubt
have looked on them as representing something new and consciously different from
earlier nineteenth-century novelists and short-story writers.
I am
Alien to Life
is an engaging collection of Djuna Barnes’s stories. It’s good to have it
available.