Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Nov. 1, 1990)
28 ▼ N o v m b r 1 990 ▼ |u* <xrt entertainment TYGRES Obscure writer a delightful find SHAKESPEARE CC Opening New York is like opening a box of dark, rich, often bitter, exotic chocolates HEART PRESENTS As You L ik e I t N ovember 2 - 25, 1990 K in g J o h n M arch 22 - A pril 14, 1991 A M id s u m m e r N i g h t ’ s D r e a m M ay 31 - J une 23, 1991 D o l o r e s W in n in g s t a d T h e a t r e P ortland C enter for the P erforming A rts or Order now! 222*9220 PC PA B ox O f f i c e 248-4496 NOV 17 O P E N IN G P E R F O R M A N C E Barb Ga l l owa y , C a c y Lee, K a t e S u l l i u a n NW SERVICE CENTER 1819 NW EVERETT PARTIAL BENEFIT FOR NARA CHILDREN'S CENTER TICKETS $11-$13 IN ADVANCE $15 A T D O O R Catbird Seat ▼ Artichoke Music ▼ Ladd's Editions Cafe Mocha ▼ Tickets subject to servioe fee Wheelchair accessible Interpreting for the hearing impaired DONNA LUCKETT PRODUCTIONS — 231 9351 ne of the great joys in my life is digging around in the rich earth of art; but an even greater joy is to discover an unknown gem in a field I thought I already fully mined. So when I turned over a cover of one of Djuna Barnes’ books I discovered terrific joy. Despite six years of academic study in literature and some considerable time on my own out there exploring, I had never even heard of this woman. Reading on, to learn about her, I became even more confused about her obscurity. Here was a writer whose style had influenced William Faulkner and Lawrence Durrell (their acknowledgement). She was also very close friends with T.S. Eliot and James Joyce (reportedly the only one allowed to call him Jim to his face in public) and both claimed her to be one of the "greatest women writers” (their sexism). That the academic over sight of her work could be tied to cul =£> tural sexism is a given in even half- enlightened circles these days. That she was also an open lesbian might R I C H A R D F R A N C I S be even more to the point, although we still don’t talk about that much. But I suspect that another reason is that her writing is so dense that it is more than a little taxing, even for academic readers. Sun and Moon Classics has recently compiled a collection of Barnes’ essays about (and titled) New York. These talks about life in that city were written by Barnes over a six year period for a large variety of New York City magazines and newspa pers. What metaphor best catches the quality of this work? One might call these brief essays snap shots of life in that place and time, but we are closer to an artist's sketchbook, experiments in miniature portraiture, or (since so many move well beyond experiment) a folio o f tiny, fine, eccentric prints. But with the richness of prose and subject in this collection, the metaphor and sense need some shifting. Opening New York is like opening their black and tan pumps and their always-high a box of dark, rich, often bitter, exotic chocolates. heels. I should say that the city was very magnifi Sometimes these are fully-realized pieces, some cent and that men had builded it, because they are times interesting failures, but they are always ex so pompous and proud, and they have such mighty citing experiments in style and content Barnes at gestures and they talk so bud. I should sum it up her best is always a very personal writer who fuses by saying that it is some city, but that people are a remarkable high-wire juggling act out of words conceiving things which, when they cease to be and images, with hair-raising leaps to the depths of dreams, becomes sometimes nightmares; fo r in convoluted introspection and wrenching human stead o f bringing calm and the glory o f having observation. She was paid $15 for each essays. produced something, people hurry and hurry to The Djuna Barnes we meet here is often out get it, and the long shadows o f the tallest sky and about “slumming.” Her greatest achievements scraper points a finger at them and says, ’Are you in writing are at those points where her elaborate not thinking too much o f your walls and too little prose can oddly become the perfect match for o f your gardens?’ expressing, with considerable depth, the feelings Barnes’ writing is so very strong that it is hard of the less-than-articulate lower classes. One fine to believe that she received no formal education example is an early essay about simple folk meet beyond a short stint in art school. She is not the ing the water at Coney Island. But no sentences pretentious academic playing with words, but can be pulled out of context to show you. Her es rather a person struggling to get it right as an ob say is a thoroughly-realized piece which is strong server, as a listener, as a writer and as a person only when complete (that is a compliment). Even with heart in even the most mundane situations. more compelling in this collection are the “inter Barnes writes with tremendous sympathy for views” called “Veterans in Harness,” which Bar other cultures, for the lower classes, for the Suffra nes wrote for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for two gists, for the movers and shakers of Greenwich months in 1913. Written as interviews with eld Village; but Barnes remained largely non-political. erly, working-class men in extremely menial jobs, This is a warning that you will not find the Barnes has taken their words and images and circumspect, politically-correct writer that one taught them how to fly. The reader can recognize might expect, given her sympathies. She will con immediately that these men couldn’t possibly talk demn causes where one would anticipate her sup this way, but that does not matter. She has cap port, and she will make word choices that are no tured a philosophy of life which was undoubtedly longer proper in a modem, polite society (such as archaic then, but which now, eight decades later, her use of the word “nigger”—the context makes reads like philosophies from another planet Try it an arguable choice). And yet when the Suffra this interview with John F. Maguire, who spent 24 gists weTC conducting hunger strikes in their at years running an elevator. She asks him about the tempt to get the woman’s vote, Barnes would give people who come into his cage and what he thinks herself up to be force-fed (as were the hunger of them: strikers) simply so that she coukl write about the I should think there must be a monstrous fe l experience. The essay is completely purged of any low with a tail and horns who wields a stinging political stance. It reads as a clear, frightening lash, fo r they hurry so in their little red boots and description of a form of physical rape performed, O simply, by one human being upon another. Stand ing back from this book, I get the sense of Barnes out on a very personal odyssey that contains some essential political ramification, but which remains an idiosyncratic quest by a woman of a very inde pendent mind. Those few glimpses which she provides into the same-sex milieu of which she was so much a part o f are all too brief, and more than a little oblique. But considering the publications she was writing for, she manages to get a lot through be tween the lines. There is a series of essays from 1916-1917 about the “Bohemian” life in the vil lage where understanding is not that great a stretch: The girl I know, too. Her hair is short (a proof that the Bohemians are, after all, so much like others that they are not original even in this); she had a historic past. She is one o f the best sports I know—she has all the maladies in the almanac, and she doesn't care. She was born laughing, and she will die that way—a boy's bugh, a laugh that springs up fro m the gutter like a flo w er. She smokes cigarettes, perhaps a hundred a day. I have seen her rum m age among the ashes fo r "makings" while there was yet a fa in t perfume in the air o f others but lately smoked at a dollar a box. I have listened to her and have bughed, but way down deep I knew she was keeping things that she feared lived—chibren o f memory, and those memories' children. She is quite reckless; she dances through an evening, she gets terribly drunk, fo r she can no longer stand what she used to do when, some ten summers ago, she was a girl. All that life holds she has borrowed to h o b once also in those long, thin hands; only the eyes never change. They are set in her face like a c h ib ’s peering over a wall where all the refuse o f life has been whirled and caught. It is a terrible and beautiful thing; her name is— let it go at that. Barnes had no great lesbian lovers during this period. She did, however, become strongly inter ested in M imi Aguglia, a Sicilian actress and dancer whom Barnes first saw in the title role of Oscar W ilde’s Sadome. No reading between the lines here: A h, what a creature; a little heavy, not a woman who has eaten her food without so much as observing it, as many do, but a woman who has gossiped with it and become strangely fam iliar. Short, black curls weighed down w ith oils and perfum es b y on her shoubers; her eyes, those marvelous, extraordinary eyes o f the ordinary Si- cilb n —set between the upper lb o f ebony and the lower lb o f bister, like jew els in bondage—looked neither to right nor to left as she advanced with curling feet to the middle o f the stage. One forgot her weight, her smallness o f stat ure, her b e k o f lithe youth . . . before my eyes d b I see M imi growl and make moan, cupping her hands like leaves in a great fire that fa il and break within the heat and die utterly. Mimi, if I am not mistaken, is a pure, great peasant. What she failed to complete with her hands, she d b with her feet; that which her feet left unaccounted fo r, her back to b . I f indeed there was anything om itted that flesh coub utter in that mad orgy o f emotion, then I do not know what it is. It is possible to ask for some more direct les bian material, forgetting her publishers and the times, but that is like asking for more food after a sumptuous feast Added to the writing are also il lustrations by Barnes, which m irror that same search for style and expression that is visible in her writing. In a culture which will delegate us to the dust bin when it can (as it seems to be doing to Bar nes), will redefine our sexuality or neuter us, his torically, when it can’t ignore us; it becomes our work to rekindle the lights that our homophobic culture has dimmed. We need to do this for our selves and for those who will “come out” after us. That this chore can include such exquisite delights as a stroll though an intoxicating prose landscape such as this provides a double pleasure in the ef fort And once you have learned your way around her essays, you might venture into the even more remarkable vistas in her novels.
