Djuna Barnes - Ladies Almanack

With Gertrude Stein’s poetry, Ladies Almanack is one of the first English-language works of this century to write through the lesbian body, celebrating not simply the abstraction of a sexual preference but the erotic as power. Given Djuna Barnes’s personal reticence, one must be all the more grateful to her for leaving us this text that outlives the brief moment of her own assent. Like Dame Musset’s last ritual, Ladies Almanack stands witness to the pleasures and perils of speaking in tongues.

NOTES

1. Hank O’Neal, “Life is painful, nasty and short — in my case it has only been painful and nasty”: Djuna Barnes, 1978–1981: An informal memoir (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 120.

2. William Burroughs, in a letter to Mary Lynn Broe, 14 January 1985, cited in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes , ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 206.

3. Mary Lynn Broe, Introduction to Silence and Power , 6.

4. See, for example, Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” in his The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963).

5. Kenneth Burke, “Version, Con-, Per-, and In- (Thoughts on Djuna Barnes’s Novel Nightwood ),” Southern Review 2 (1966): 329–46; rpt. in Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 240–53. “Perversion” also figures in Ulrich Weisstein’s “Beasts, Dolls, and Women: Djuna Barnes’s Human Bestiary,” Renascence 15 (Fall 1962): 3–11.

6. Quoted by Frances McCullough in Silence and Power , 366.

7. McCullough, ibid.

8. Nancy J. Levine, “‘Bringing Milkshakes to Bulldogs’: The Early Journalism of Djuna Barnes,” in Silence and Power , 28.

9. [Lydia Steptoe], “Diary of a Dangerous Child; Which Should Be of Interest to All Those Who Want to Know How Women Get the Way They Are,” Vanity Fair 18 (July 1922): 94.

10. Louis Kannenstine, The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 22.

11. Bertha Harris, “The More Profound Nationality of Their Lesbianism: Lesbian Society in Paris in the 1920’s.” In Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian Feminist Anthology , ed. Phyllis Birkby, Bertha Harris, Jill Johnston, Esther Newton, and Jane O’Wyatt (New York: Times Change Press, 1973), 79.

12. See Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 19001940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); and Benstock, “Paris Lesbianism and the Politics of Reaction, 1900–1940,” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past , ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1989), 332-46.

13. Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War (1930), quoted in Silence and Power , 36.

14. Broe, Introduction to Silence and Power , 5.

15. For a discussion of the influence of L’imagerie populaire , the illustrations of Ladies Almanack , and Barnes’ artistic career in general, see Frances M. Doughty, “Gilt on Cardboard: Djuna Barnes as Illustrator of Her Life and Work,” in Silence and Power , 137-54.

16. Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: Random House, 1977), 69.

17. James Scott, Djuna Barnes (Boston: Twayne, 1976), 79–80.

18. Kannenstine, The Art of Djuna Barnes , 53–54.

19. Andrew Field, Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes (New York: Putnam’s, 1983), 124, 127.

20. Catharine Stimpson, Afterword to Silence and Power , 371.

21. “Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the Language of Celebration,” Frontiers 4 (Fall 1979): 39–46. A revised version of this essay appears as “Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the Discourse of Desire” in Silence and Power , 156-68.

22. Benstock, Women of the Left Bank , 249-50.

23. Cheryl J. Plumb, Fancy’s Craft: Art and Identity in the Early Works of Djuna Barnes (Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania: Susquehanna University Press, 1986), 101.

24. Frann Michel, “All Women Are Not Women All: Ladies Almanack and Feminine Writing,” in Silence and Power , 182.

25. Karla Jay, “The Outsider Among the Expatriates: Djuna Barnes’s Satire on the Ladies of the Almanack ,” in Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions , ed. Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 204-16. This essay also appears in Silence and Power , 184-93.

26. Solita Solano, letter to Djuna Barnes, winter 1967; Natalie Barney, letters of 21 July 1962 and mid-May 1969; all in the Barnes Collection, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland at College Park.

Most of the characters of Ladies Almanack were identifiable to Natalie Barney and Janet Flanner, who annotated their copies accordingly. Doll Furious is Dolly Wilde; Patience Scalpel, Mina Loy; Senorita Flyabout, Mimi Franchetti; Lady Buck-and-Balk, Una Troubridge; Tilly Tweedin-Blood, Radclyffe Hall; the messengers Nip and Tuck, Flanner and Solano; Bounding Bess, Esther Murphy; and Cynic Sal, Romaine Brooks.

27. Shari Benstock, “Expatriate Sapphic Modernism: Entering Literary History,” in Lesbian Texts and Contexts , 186.

28. It is important to point out for the historical record that, as Karla Jay argues, Natalie Barney herself set about to reject precisely such stereotypes of lesbians as men manqué; she herself reportedly delighted in “femininity.”

29. See Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980); rpt. in Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: Norton, 1986), 23–68. There has been considerable controversy among lesbian-feminists about the notion of a “lesbian continuum.” Rich’s afterword (pp. 68–75) includes some of this discussion.

30. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1928), 246.

31. Benstock, “Expatriate Sapphic Modernism,” 189.

32. Barnes, letter to Peter Hoare, 18 July 1963, quoted in Silence and Power , 337.

33. Djuna Barnes, letter to Natalie Barney, 16 Oct 1963. In Barnes Collection.

34. Julia [Penelope] Stanley and Susan Robbins, “Lesbian Humor,” Women: A Journal of Liberation , May 1977, 26–29.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books by Djuna Barnes

This list includes books and monographs by Barnes (in and out of print) and book-length collections of her shorter works. For a comprehensive bibliography of Barnes’s serial publications, see Douglas Messerli, Djuna Barnes: A Bibliography (David Lewis, 1975).

The Antiphon: A Play . London: Faber and Faber (New York: Farrar, Straus), 1958.

A Book . New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923.

The Book of Repulsive Women: Eight Rhythms and Five Drawings . Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1989.

Creatures in an Alphabet . New York: Dial, 1982.

Interviews . Ed. Alyce Barry. College Park, Md.: Sun & Moon Press, 1985.

Ladies Almanack . Dijon: Darantière, 1928; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1972; rpt. New York: New York University Press, 1992.

A Night Among the Horses . New York: Horace Liveright, 1929.

New York . Ed. Alyce Barry. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1989.

Nightwood . London: Faber and Faber, 1936; 2nd ed. New York: New Directions, 1946; rpt. 1961.

Ryder . New York: Boni and Liveright, 1928; rpt. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979; rev. ed. Lisle, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.