Djuna Barnes - Ladies Almanack

They put her upon a great Pyre, and burned her to the Heart … And when they came to the ash that was left of her, all had burned but the Tongue, and this flamed, and would not suffer Ash, and it played about the handful that had been she indeed. (84)

Musset is to be the same tireless lover in death as in life, as “Skirts swirled in haste” and “some hundred Women were seen bent in Prayer” (84). Revising a story Dr. O’Connor tells in Ryder in which a man’s member outlives him, and rewriting The Well of Loneliness’s language of martyrdom in which the “stigmata” of the “invert” are compared to the wounds of Christ, 30this ribald finale is also, like Irigaray’s double play in “When Our Lips Speak Together,” a serious reclamation of the sexual and verbal tongue. No finale could be more appropriate for the intricate discourse of Ladies Almanack , a text that speaks in tongues.

There are, to be sure, less exuberant moments in Ladies Almanack . Like all Barnes’s work, this one is preoccupied with questions of time and death, with the powers and dangers of sexuality, with ambivalence about women and indeed about human possibility. But those who focus on the occasions of homophobic doubt or internalized sexism in Ladies Almanack might well read it against its more chaste if differently daring 1928 sister-text, The Well of Loneliness . Written for a large audience of middle-class heterosexuals with the express purpose of securing homosexual “tolerance,” The Well of Loneliness could not afford to take the risks in language, plot, and ideology available to Barnes. In Hall’s novel, Natalie Barney is the exceptional courageous lesbian who shores her homosexual sisters and brothers against the overwhelming tragedy of “inversion,” pitting herself valiantly but unsuccessfully against a glum, despairing lot who hang out in shoddy bars, drink too much, and wait for the next suicide. By contrast, the privately published Ladies Almanack is both overwhelmingly positive and startlingly sexual. The book’s cryptic verbal flourishes — excessive even for Barnes — seem to me designed to distract potential censors from just this boldness, for as the text reminds us, certain things “could be printed nowhere and in no Country, for Life is represented in no City by a Journal dedicated to the Undercurrents, or for that matter to any real Fact whatsoever” (34). Barnes’s lesbian writing would “loom the bigger if stripped of its Jangle,” but must go “drugged” instead, “twittering so loud upon the Wire that one cannot hear the Message. And yet!” (46). Such “Jangle”—and the fate of Hall’s courageous Well of Lonelinessy —suggest how difficult commercial publication of Ladies Almanack would have been even in the seemingly enlightened Paris of 1928.

The celebratory impulses of Ladies Almanack are also dimmed by the hindsight of Nightwood , a far bleaker and more disturbing text. Like most earlier readers of Barnes, I came to Ladies Almanack through Nightwood , enchanted by its lush language and extraordinary images, riveted by the drama of Nora’s love for Robin and by Matthew O’Connor’s eccentricity, confused between the novel’s matter-of-fact focus on homosexuals and the disastrous fate of its lesbian relationships. But Nightwood is the work of another personal and political moment. If Ladies Almanack is a book of “rupture,” of écriture féminine, Nightwood “shines a cold light on the fear of alternative sexualities and the forces of their repression.” 31If Ladies Almanack celebrates the lesbian body, Nightwood sees sexuality as more bondage than bond. Barnes was of course writing out in Nightwood her painful separation from her own Night Wood as well as her disillusionment with Europe as the high joy of high modernism yielded to the spread of fascism and the imminence of war.

I want to speculate that the pain reflected in Nightwood and wrought by the political and personal events of the 1930s converged with overwhelming power to break Djuna Barnes’ artistic heart. She wrote in a letter to Peter Hoare in 1963 that there were “professional” writers who could continue under any circumstances, but that her “kind” were less predictable: “the ‘passion spent,’ and even the fury — the passion made into Nightwood the fury (nearly) exhausted in The Antiphon … what is left? ‘The horror,’ as Conrad put it.” 32After her return to New York she seems to have continued living mentally in pre-war Paris, not with the cheerful nostalgia of a Kay Boyle or a Janet Flanner, but with despair and bitterness, as if she had left behind not only an extraordinary community but her own extraordinariness as well. Although she had criticized expatriate culture while she lived within it, in her later years she wrote and spoke of Paris with sad longing for a golden age, and when Cocteau and Piaf died in 1963 she wrote to Barney that “our legendary time is being calendared.” 33 The Antiphon is certainly her angriest work, with its agonized family relationships and its tormented, sexually victimized heroine Miranda who may be a figure for the young daughter of Wald Barnes; it is also the work that took her longest to produce, and after it she became virtually unable to complete a new project though she continued writing multiple drafts mostly of poetry.

It is perhaps not irrelevant that during this same period in the 1960s and 1970s the woman who had once gleefully defined depravity as “the ability to enjoy what others shudder at and to shudder at what others enjoy” became a professed sexual conservative. She scrawled “filthy paper” in red ink on the back of the review in Gay of Ladies Almanack in which Michael Perkins praised her as “our greatest living writer”; she refused to restore the portions of Ryder that had been censored by her publisher in 1928; and she worried constantly that her work would be charged with “salaciousness.” I find plausible Hank O’Neal’s belief that Barnes feared her “association with lesbianism” had kept her work from being valued as art. Certainly T. S. Eliot had had difficulty getting Nightwood’s subject matter past Faber and Faber’s board of editors, and the distributor of Ladies Almanack had panicked about putting his name to the book even though it was published more or less privately and in a foreign tongue.

Djuna Barnes’s retrenchment makes Ladies Almanack and the happenstance of its publication all the more astonishing. Dame Musset’s story dances lightly on the dark surfaces of Barnes’s later life and work, offering a moment in which the troublesome questions of gender, love, and sexuality converge with more pleasure than suffering and with ideological implications far more radical and gynocentric than Barnes “herself” might have avowed. We may have to account for the vision of Ladies Almanack in the euphoric daring of a cultural moment for which Barnes — perhaps because she was writing privately and playfully — let herself be an articulating voice. It is a voice that does not seem to reappear in public until the 1970s, when some lesbian writers accepted the call of Hélène Cixous and Claudine Hermann to become “voleuses de langue,” to steal and fly with language. As Julia Penelope and Susan Robbins have noted, much lesbian humor works through this kind of theft, “‘playing off’ heterosexist assumptions and institutions,” 34subverting patriarchal folklore to lesbian ends. Alix Dobkin’s song “A, You’re an Amazon,” Jan Oxenberg’s film “A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts,” Judy Grahn’s fable “The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke,” Olga Broumas’s poem “Little Red Riding Hood” and Robin Morgan’s “Hansel and Gretel” are all works of the seventies that operate in this way.