Something in the Dark: Merve Emre on the Short Stories of Djuna Barnes
Edvard Munch: The Kiss of Death, 1899
Djuna Barnes’s short stories return again and again to characters suffering from love, fear, and alienation.
By Merve Emre
Originally published in The New York Review of Books on Oct 5, 2024
To read Djuna Barnes attentively is to begin to suspect how wretched she must have been. Her themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts. In nearly every other story, one encounters a man or woman on all fours, trembling, weeping, half mad with either lust or torment. In “Spillway,” the tubercular Mrs. Julie Anspacher returns from a long stay at a sanatorium with the dying child of a dead lover, and tries to explain the nature of her misery to her bewildered husband. “It is a thing beyond the end of everything,” she tells him. “It’s suffering without a consummation, it’s like insufficient sleep; it’s like anything that is without proportion.” Yet her suffering fills her with a hysterical joy—with the ecstasy of having become “alien to life.” When, at the end of the story, she lowers herself “down, down, down, down” onto her hands and knees, one wonders if she will ever get up.
This is the essential tension of Barnes’s short fiction: her characters may be alien to life, but they are alive—spectacularly, grotesquely alive, and preserved by their illicit desires and obscene thoughts. They seem to have no choice but to talk about these thoughts torrentially, to strain and gasp at the monstrosity of life in breathless broken sentences. There is mystery in their talk—like that of her contemporaries Mary Butts and Mina Loy, Barnes’s language is at once sensational and veiled—but no spirituality. Her characters suffer purely and plainly, with no possibility of grace, no hope of redemption, no transcendence through the power of art or God.
The worldly Madame von Bartmann of “Aller et Retour” takes pleasure in informing her timid daughter that life “is filthy; it is also frightful.” “There is everything in it,” she says, “murder, pain, beauty, disease—death…. God is the light the mortal insect kindled, to turn to, and to die by. That is very wise, but it must not be misunderstood.” The daughter recoils from her mother’s insistence that she “know everything” and marries a government clerk, a man of wealth and incurably dull habits, committing herself to a life of propriety. As Madame von Bartmann takes her leave of the couple, she laments her wasted efforts at enlightening her child. “Ah, how unnecessary,” she sighs.
The world of Barnes’s stories is divided between those who speak the truth and those who refuse to hear it. One wonders which is the light and which is the shadow—ignorance or the knowledge of pain? Yet, whether her characters accept it or not, suffering is the grounds of existence. “There is something in me that is mournful because it is being,” the gynecologist Dr. Katrina Silverstaff cries in “The Doctors,” suggesting that, from the beginning, life is pathological; that it is “rotten with virtue and with vice,” as Madame von Bartmann informs her daughter. For Barnes, life’s rottenness eats away at us all: virgins and whores, murderers and saints, humans and horses, flowers and vines. Her masochism is relentlessly democratic, and it cannot be unraveled from her deep sense of sympathy or her conception of love; the uncommon interest that she takes in any creature, however degenerate, who turns up on the doorstep of her imagination. It would be easy for all this talk of suffering to turn brittle or humorless. But Barnes knows when to cue our laughter; Dr. Silverstaff is a fantastic name for a gynecologist.
What explains Barnes? Although I had read and taught her 1936 novel Nightwood many times before reading her stories, it had never occurred to me to investigate her life. For a long time, I believed that the strange beauty of her language had bucked my desire for history; I now wonder if I was afraid of what I would discover. My reaction, I later learned, was the opposite of her biographer Phillip Herring’s. “I wanted to teach Nightwood, but felt frustrated by my futile attempts to understand it; before I could understand the novel,” he concluded, “I had to understand Djuna Barnes.”
She was born on Storm King Mountain in the Hudson Valley in 1892, the daughter of an English mother and a wandering American fiddler and horse breeder, a man who believed in free love and trafficked freely in cruelty. Their home was filled with his lovers and friends, one or more of whom, Barnes hints in her journals, raped her when she was a teenager. For a time, she lived with her grandmother, with whom she had an appallingly intimate relationship, to say the least. When she returned to her father’s home, he turned Barnes, her siblings, and her mother out and refused to support them. She moved to New York, then to Paris in 1921, where she ran around with Eliot, Pound, and Stein, and had the shattering love affair with Thelma Wood that she would draw on for Nightwood. She did not return to New York until 1939, alone and destitute. When she died in 1982, she had published almost nothing for forty years. Here was a life forged in an unfathomable agony that irradiated any milder emotions.
The concentration of pain seems to have led to a notably concentrated aesthetic. We can count on one hand her recurring settings: there is a city, glittering and squalid. Or there is the sinister quiet of the countryside, with one or two well-bred horses in the stable. Inside a house, whips of rich leather and a menagerie of decorative objects, “Venetian glasses and bowls of onyx, silks, cushions and perfumes.” No doubt Barnes borrows many of her furnishings from the writers of the fin de siècle. But in her hands their decadence turns jagged, elliptical, and emphatically cosmopolitan, with characters speaking in tuneful snatches of English, German, Russian, and French.
We can count on the other hand the characters on whom Barnes lavishes her attention. There are men, some melancholy and philosophical, others sensual and contemptuous. In her most chilling story, “Oscar,” the former is represented by Oliver Kahn, who “had an odor about him of the rather recent cult of the ‘terribly good,’” and the latter by Ulric Straussmann, “the type who can turn the country, with a single gesture, into a brothel.” There is often a woman of wealth or noble title, who, though no longer young, burns with ill-fated love, like Princess Frederica Rholinghausen of “The Passion” or Madame Boliver of “Indian Summer.” Sometimes there is a child, or childlike figure, who seeks to penetrate the secrets of the adult world, as in “A Boy Asks a Question” or “The Rabbit.” Expecting compassion or guidance, the child is instead initiated into the horrors of sex and death.
The story “The Perfect Murder” seems to parody Barnes’s fixation on perverse human specimens. Professor Anatol Profax, a dialectologist, is on a quest to find a truly original human being. On the street, he meets a trapeze artist, a woman in flowing black who speaks brightly and manically, in riddles. She tells him that she regularly dies and returns to life, each time in the form of a new trauma, a testament to the many depravities of modern civilization: “People adore me—after a long time, after I have told them how beastly they are—weak and sinful.” Perhaps because he is maddened by her, perhaps to call her bluff, the professor slits her throat and packs her body into his leather trunk. The body disappears, only to reappear later that day in the taxi next to his, alive again. “Lost, lost…something extraordinary…I’ve let it slip right through my fingers,” he thinks. One can sense Barnes’s desire never to let an extraordinary creature slip out of her grasp.
Plot is not Barnes’s strength, although it is difficult to tell whether it simply fails to hold her interest or whether, in the end, all of her plots—all lives—dead-end with the same revelations, the same drives. “I love, I fear, I hunger, I die,” as Professor Profax lists them. She is more interested in how these drives can turn a person into something more and less than an average, ordinary human being. Consider Freda Buckler of the story “A Night Among the Horses,” who has “a battery for a heart and the body of a toy.” Or Madame Boliver, who “lent a plastic embodiment to all hitherto unembodied things. She was like some rare wood, carved into a melting form—she breathed abruptly as one who has been dead for a half a century.”
Love envelops her characters like a second skin. Fear dyes the very fibers of their being. At their most sensitive, Barnes’s tropes and figures—the rare wood, the battery-operated heart—erode any meaningful distinctions between mind and matter, person and thing. At its crudest, her fiction degrades into racial and ethnic mythologies: One character presents “vivid streaks of German lust.” Another is “a hot melancholy Jew.” Yet encountering Djuna Barnes’s finest characters is like bumping into something hard and heaving in the dark and not being able to discern whether it is a person, an animal, a piece of furniture, or another entity entirely.
Most of the stories are told in the third person by a narrator who possesses a profound understanding of the human condition, an understanding that is hinted at but never revealed. Four of the stories are first-person soliloquies: “Cassation” (initially called “A Little Girl Tells a Story to a Lady”), “The Grande Malade” (“The Little Girl Continues”), “Dusie,” and “Behind the Heart.” Their narrators speak with urgency of violent, unrequited love, mostly between women who are “‘tragique’ and ‘triste’ and ‘tremendous’ all at once.” Their compulsion to narrate is born of the desire to remember a past that everyone else would rather forget. “Yes, even now the story had begun to fade with me; it is so in Paris; France eats her own history, n’est-ce-pas, Madame?” the narrator of “Dusie” asks. The listeners in these stories never respond. Are they bored? Amused? One wonders if they exist at all, or if the little girls are speaking to themselves, trying to keep their own company in the heart of the night.
The last of the soliloquies, “Behind the Heart,” is a love story about a man and woman who are briefly together, then separate. Its emotions are keyed to a much lower pitch than the rest of the collection. Its language is simpler and more affecting. It is my favorite, although my attachment to it is a source of both disappointment and relief: disappointment that I am not, at this moment, sufficiently estranged from life to feel in the absolute depths of my being the truth of the other stories; relief for the same reason. This estrangement was, for Barnes, the cost of living. For her readers, it is the price of admission into her world. How many of us are willing to pay it?
A version of this essay appears as the foreword to I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories by Djuna Barnes, edited by Merve Emre, published on October 8 by McNally Editions.
Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism and the Director of the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan. She is the host of The Critic and Her Publics, a new podcast series produced in partnership with The New York Review and Lit Hub.