Djuna Barnes - Ladies Almanack

Over far,

We’ll know you for the woman

That you are.

• • •

See you sagging down with bulging

Hair to sip,

The dappled damp from some vague

Under lip.

Your soft saliva, loosed

With orgy, drip.

As the first of an interconnected series of poems about “repulsive women,” “From Fifth Avenue Up” inaugurates a journey not only through Manhattan to the city morgue but from lesbian sexual freedom to a heterosexual femininity that slides toward death. In the first poem “the woman that you are” is pulsing with potency, but the woman in the next poem “settles down we say; / It means her powers slip away.” Now she “sits beneath the chinaware / Sits mouthing meekly in a chair,” and instead of the “short sharp modern / Babylonic cries” of the first woman (or of her former self), “a vacant space is in her face— / Where nothing came to take the place / of high hard cries.” If Louis Kannenstine is right to say that The Book of Repulsive Women records an “awareness of some lost potential,” 10it seems to me that the lost potential is distinctly sexual and almost as distinctly lesbian. In this sense Barnes’s first book creates a saga that Ladies Almanack will reverse, as the crusading lesbian Dame Musset “saves” women from unhappy heterosexuality.

Suggestions of lesbian existence surface in several other of Barnes’ writings of the 1910s and 1920s, most visibly the one-act play, “The Dove.” Carolyn Allen has shown a “lesbian imagination” at work in Barnes’s three “little girl” stories: “Dusie,” “Cassation,” and “The Grande Malade.” But it is not until Ladies Almanack that lesbianism becomes both an explicit thematic focus and a subject ripe for play. This difference between the cryptic moments in the earlier writing and the full-fledged lesbian discourse of Ladies Almanack —like the difference, in turn, between the high spirits of the Almanack and Nightwood’s anguished despair — suggests the power of a historical and personal moment to shape artistic work. For Ladies Almanack seems to me as much the creation of “1928” and “Paris” as of “Djuna Barnes.” Barnes could not have written Ladies Almanack much earlier or later, for the writer would have been a different Djuna Barnes.

When Barnes went to Paris around 1920 she was entering not only a well-established group of American expatriates, and an international community of writers and artists committed to radical experimentation in social content and aesthetic form, but a network of lesbians for many of whom sexual and aesthetic values seem to have converged in what Shari Benstock has called “Sapphic modernism.” Bertha Harris describes this group as a self-styled, affluent elite to whom “to be upper class was at its finest to be also gay,” and for whom lesbianism conferred

automatic rank as an aristocrat; to be lesbian was at its finest also to be upper class. In general, all that was heterosexual was ‘ugliness’ and all that was lesbian, ‘beautiful’; and they spent their time in refined enactment of that which was beautiful and fleeing from that which they knew as ugliness. . They directed their energies toward the recreation of what they wanted to be their ancestry, an age of Sappho delightful with lyric paganism, attic abandonment. 11

Benstock has shown that there was in fact much more difference — and dissonance — among the Paris lesbians than this description suggests. 12But Harris’s words do describe some of the values espoused by Natalie Barney, who made her sexual identity a public statement and purposefully set herself and her writings against patriarchal ideologies, homophobic sexologies, and heterosexual conventionalities, rejecting especially the discourses that constructed lesbians as misbegotten men or defective women or “inverts” of a “third sex.” In Barney’s logic, which also becomes the logic of Ladies Almanack , lesbianism is a “feminine” option and an alternative to the oppression of women by men.

Whether or not they shared Barney’s sexual values or lived openly as lesbians, the women who were at one time or another associated with the Paris lesbian communities — including, at various moments, Colette, Liane de Pougy, Renée Vivien, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Vernon Lee, Vita Sackville-West, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, Romaine Brooks, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Dolly Wilde, Elisabeth de Gramont, Dorothy Bussy, Edith Sitwell, Violet Trefusis, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, Janet Flanner (“Genêt”) and Solita Solano, H. D., Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Thelma Wood and Djuna Barnes — found in the European capital this escape from both provincial hetero/sexism and artistic restraint that Natalie Barney helped to make possible. As an intellectually, socially, and economically privileged community, this loosely affiliated group was more able than most to leave written and artistic records of itself and to participate in an aesthetic movement in ways that have yet to be recognized.

However she identified herself publicly or privately, during Barnes’ years in Paris her sexual involvements were primarily with women, and she knew most of the expatriate lesbians in the intellectual community. She is said to have had several affairs during this period, including a brief liaison with Natalie Barney and a briefer one with Margaret Anderson’s partner Jane Heap. But the most important lover of this era and arguably of her life was Thelma Wood, a silverpoint artist whom she probably met in Berlin in the early twenties and with whom she remained involved into the 1930s although the relationship clearly turned bitter some time before 1930 or 1931. In an age of psychoanalysis Barnes seems resolutely to have refused self-scrutiny — Margaret Anderson complained that she “was not on speaking terms with her own psyche,” 13but her relationship with Thelma caused deep and unconcealed suffering. According to Mary Lynn Broe, the “fiercely proud” Barnes “claimed that she was a doormat only once in her life — to Thelma Wood — and then she was ‘a damned good doormat.’ “ 14In an undated letter from this period, Thelma (who writes of herself in the third person as “Simon”) begs “Junie” to forgive her for her drinking and her infidelities. Such a letter surely evokes Nightwood’s Robin Vote, and Barnes has identified Thelma as Robin’s counterpart although she names Henrietta Metcalf rather than herself as the model for Robin’s lover Nora Flood. But in 1927 and 1928 when Barnes was writing her most high-spirited “Rabelaisian” works, her relationship with Thelma seems to have been closer and happier: Ryder is dedicated (discreetly) to T. W., and Ladies Almanack was created for Thelma while Djuna tended her in a hospital. Having just written and illustrated Ryder as a parodic, picaresque pastiche with sharp feminist undertones, Barnes uses a similar form and style for what she dubbed her “female Tom Jones.”

The picaresque hero of Ladies Almanack is the aristocratic Dame Evangeline Musset, her last name evoking the Romantic poet Alfred de Musset, celebrant of love who was also, disastrously, a lover of George Sand; her first name recalling both her American origins and her missionary zeal. The book is structured as a monthly chronicle, a form Barnes later continued in her magazine columns in Playgoers Almanack and Knickerbocker Almanack . Within the frame of the calendar, Ladies Almanack embeds both a picaresque fable of Dame Musset’s life from birth to death and a variety of “digressions” that appropriate Western traditions and rewrite patriarchal texts, as if anticipating Monique Wittig’s call to women in Les Guérillères to “remember, or failing that, invent.” The book is boldly and bawdily illustrated, like Ryder primarily through an iconography drawn from Pierre Louis Duchartre and Rene Saulnier’s 1925 collection of engravings and woodcuts, L’imagérie populaire . These drawings inaugurate a departure in Barnes’s visual artistry from the fin-de-siècle high-art expressionist drawings of the ‘teens, with their angular emphasis on the somber and the grotesque, to the curvaceous representations, at once sensuous and humorous, that will dominate Barnes’s graphic art for years to come. 15