Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes – Life, Work, and Legacy

Delve into the life and writings of Djuna Barnes (1892–1982), a groundbreaking modernist writer, poet, journalist, and artist. Explore her biography, major works (Nightwood, Ladies Almanack), themes, influence, and quotes that capture her singular voice.

Introduction

Djuna Barnes was a fiercely independent, formally inventive, and deeply complex voice in 20th-century modernist literature. Her work blends poetic intensity, avant-garde sensibility, queer consciousness, and psychological depth. Best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), Barnes pushed literary boundaries—both in style and subject matter—long before many of today’s conversations around gender, sexuality, and identity became more public. Yet her life was also marked by struggle, introspection, and a kind of creative solitude that both fueled and haunted her work.

Early Life and Family

Djuna Chappell Barnes was born June 12, 1892 on Storm King Mountain near Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York.
Her upbringing was chaotic, nonconformist, and artistically charged:

• Her paternal grandmother, Zadel Barnes, was a writer, journalist, and suffrage activist who hosted literary salons and was a major influence.

• Her father, Wald Barnes (also known by variants of Henry Budington Barnes), was a struggling artist, musician, and painter. He maintained unconventional domestic arrangements: in 1897, his mistress, Frances “Fanny” Clark, moved in with the family.

• The family was large (eight children in all, combining the births with Elizabeth Barnes and Fanny Clark) and financially precarious.

• Much of the family’s financial burden fell on Zadel. She supplemented income by writing letters, calling in favors, and mobilizing her social networks.

Djuna’s formal schooling was minimal. She was mostly educated at home by her grandmother and father in literature, art, and music. Mathematics and conventional academic subjects were neglected.
Later, in New York, she briefly attended Pratt Institute and the Art Students League (around 1912–1916), though she left to support herself through work.

Her early life included personal turmoil: there are literary and biographical hints (though unconfirmed) of sexual violence or incest during her youth—allegations she never fully addressed herself.

At age 18, she entered a brief marriage to Percy Faulkner, Fanny Clark’s brother, which was arranged by her family. The marriage lasted only a few months.

These early years were formative both in inculcating literary ambition and in shaping themes that would later surface in her work: family rupture, identity, secrecy, and the costs of silence.

Youth and Early Career

By her early twenties, Barnes had moved to New York City (c. 1912) with part of her family in difficult financial straits.
In New York:

• She began work as a journalist and illustrator, including for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York Press, The World, McCall’s, and others. She often combined writing and her own drawings.

• She interviewed cultural figures—including James Joyce—and covered a wide variety of topics, from theater reviews to social commentary.

• She joined the artistic milieu of Greenwich Village, linking to avant-garde writers, bohemians, and the Provincetown Players.

• She published a chapbook, The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), a provocative mix of poetry and drawings, which she later tried to distance herself from.

By the 1920s, Barnes had established herself as a literary insider with a strong voice and connections in the transatlantic modernist scene. In 1921 she traveled to Paris on assignment for McCall’s, and she stayed in Europe for much of the following decade.

In Paris she joined the circle around salon host Natalie Barney, became close to the Dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and entered into an intense relationship with the artist Thelma Wood. These relationships, especially with Wood, deeply influenced her later major work.

Major Period & Literary Works

Ladies Almanack (1928)

A highly stylized roman à clef, Ladies Almanack satirizes the lesbian social world of Paris, particularly the circle around Natalie Barney. Written in archaic, Rabelaisian prose and self-illustrated with woodcut-style drawings, it blends humor, obscurity, and coded reference.

Its ambiguity—whether affectionate or critical—has drawn decades of critical debate. Barnes held a particular fondness for it, rereading it throughout her life.

Ryder (1928)

Ryder is a fragmented family saga concerned with memory, time, and identity. It draws partly on her childhood in New York, incorporating multiple narrative modes—letters, dreams, interior monologue—and shifting viewpoints.

Its original illustrations and some textual content were censored or suppressed in early editions; later editions restored many of those parts.

Nightwood (1936)

Nightwood is Barnes’s masterpiece and the work for which she is most widely known. Set in Paris in the 1920s, the novel focuses on a circle of emotionally wounded characters, particularly Robin Vote and Dr. Matthew O’Connor, mapped loosely onto Barnes’s own relationship with Thelma Wood.

The novel is lyrical, psychologically intense, and structurally daring. Its language is often dense and metaphorical. T. S. Eliot, who published it via Faber & Faber, wrote an introduction praising Barnes’s poetic prose rhythm.

Though critically acclaimed, it sold poorly initially. Its influence grew over decades, especially in feminist, queer, and modernist studies.

The Antiphon (1958)

After years of relative silence, Barnes published The Antiphon, a verse drama drawing heavily on her own family history, betrayal, and psychological conflict. The play is intense, claustrophobic, and highly symbolic.

It premiered (in translation) abroad and was rarely performed in the U.S.

Later Works & Creatures in an Alphabet

In her later years, Barnes concentrated mostly on poetry and revisions. She worked obsessively—some reports say drafting hundreds of versions—for small poems rather than novels.

Her final published work was Creatures in an Alphabet (1982), a collection of short, allusive poems in a bestiary format. While superficially childlike, the language is dense and richly associative.

Barnes also attempted a biography of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, collecting her letters and poems, but she never completed or published it.

Later Life, Struggles & Reclusion

By the 1930s, Barnes was facing financial instability, declining health, and increasing personal struggle.
She suffered from alcoholism, attempted suicide in 1939, and was intermittently hospitalized.

In 1940, she returned to New York and settled into a small apartment at Patchin Place in Greenwich Village, where she would live for 41 years in relative isolation.
She stopped drinking and devoted her later life to poetry, rewriting, and self-editing.

She became reclusive and suspicious of acquaintances. Many writers and fans tried to contact her; some left gifts at her mailbox. E. E. Cummings, her neighbor, would occasionally shout, “Are you still alive, Djuna?”

In 1961, she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
In 1981, she was awarded a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Djuna Barnes died on June 18, 1982, in her Greenwich Village apartment, just days after her 90th birthday. She was, by then, the last surviving member of her generation of English-language modernists.

Major Themes & Literary Significance

Queer Modernism & Gender

Barnes was one of the earliest modernist writers to center queer experience openly, though often obliquely. Nightwood in particular expresses lesbian identity, desire, and alienation in modern urban life.

Her works investigate gender dynamics, power, betrayal, and the conflicts between public persona and interior lives.

Fragmentation & Multiplicity

Her narrative techniques eschew linear plots; she often uses fragmentation, shifting points of view, interior monologue, and poetic syntax to explore memory, identity, and the instability of consciousness.

Silence, Voice & Trauma

Barnes’s characters frequently wrestle with unspeakable trauma, repression, and the price of silence. Her own life—marked by secrecy, estrangement, and loss—resonates through her work’s emotional textures.

Literary Experimentation

Her integration of poetry, prose, myth, symbols, and intertextual allusion positions her work at an avant-garde intersection. She pushed boundaries of genre, narrative form, and syntax.

Influence & Later Reception

Though Barnes’s reputation waned mid-century, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries feminist, queer, and modernist scholars revived her work. She has influenced writers exploring gender, memory, identity, and experimental narrative.

Selected Quotes by Djuna Barnes

“The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.”
“I am not a lesbian; I just loved Thelma.”
(On Nightwood) “It is the nostril of a god’s lightning that leaps from the directionless wind.”
“I wrote The Antiphon with clenched teeth … my handwriting was as savage as a dagger.”

Her lines carry both beauty and bite, often inhabiting the border between lyric poetry and dark introspection.

Lessons from Djuna Barnes’s Life

1. Creativity can sustain even in solitude
   Though Barnes spent decades quietly reworking poems, her later output belies the notion that creative value must always be public and prolific.

2. Art can transmute trauma
   Many of Barnes’s struggles—family fracture, identity, betrayal—become fuel for her explorations of voice and silence.

3. Form and innovation matter
   Barnes demonstrates that how a story is told can be as significant as what the story is. Her experiments in language, structure, and perspective reshape meaning.

4. Courage in defiance
   Her life and work defied both social norms and literary conventions, carving space for voices that were marginalized or silenced.

5. Legacy is non-linear
   Barnes’s posthumous reception teaches that influence often lingers quietly, waiting for later readers to rediscover and revalue.

Conclusion

Djuna Barnes remains a singular figure in American letters: irreducible, challenging, and essential. Nightwood, Ladies Almanack, Ryder, and The Antiphon offer readers not just stories but portals into the interior fissures of desire, memory, identity, and voice. Barnes reminds us that literature can be an excavation—of self, of secrecy, of the fragile architecture of language itself.