freeing the family
by Douglas Messerli
Djuna Barnes Biography of Julie von Bartmann (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2020)
Yet it is hard even speak of “events’
such as these in Barnes’ work. Unlike most US plays, which lay out a “story”
through their character’s lives are revealed, Barnes’ highly artificed theater
is centered in what one might describe as “revelations,” most long statements
about oneself and life, alternating with a questions or sparring conversations,
such as those between the powerful opera singer Julie van Bartmann and the
strong-minded “landholder,” Born. And even the “revelations” are less revealing
of how the characters think than how they perceive the world morally and
philosophically; yet since these statements are presented in a highly literary
language, filled with aphorisms, puns, extended metaphors, and dualities, we
cannot even be sure that the character is speaking honestly or attempting to
play out a desired notion of themselves.
Barnes begins the play in simple
anticipation as Born’s two sons, Gart and Costa (like her language, Barnes
generally stocks her works with strangely named figures—not unlike her own name
and those of her brothers) who await the arrival of their father and a new
boarder, Julie, who is apparently staying at the house—the boys do some
farming, but Born seems to have retired—to rest up before she returns to the
stage. Evidently, she is not the first grand person to stay with them, women
who, throughout the years, have had had passionate relations with their father,
even while their mother, now dead, was still living.
Gart, the elder son, is thin and
handsome, a gentle soul who plays the organ well. The younger son, Costa, is
shorter and broader shouldered, a figure described as a kind of “beast,” having
a connection with the soil. The daughter, Gustava, nineteen years of age, is an
excitable young woman who cares for pigeons and garden. All three are in awe of
their dominating father.
The rest of the drama plays out various encounters between these
figures, in which each fall in love, in some respect, with the grand Julie. The
first such “encounter” is understandably between Basil Born and Julie, and she
questions him about himself, his children, and the house in which she is to
stay. These passages, in particular, have the feel of a tennis match as each of
these strong figures sends out charged and even barbed messages about their
temperaments and sexualities:
julie
I am not married, that is—not married. I have not money
worries.
I love—peculiarity,
perhaps you would call it vice (she
raises her
eyes watching him). Nothing
astonishes me. In the night, when it
rains, when the
lightning flashes and the thunder rolls, I do no not
draw my toes up, I
sleep, and leave terror and superstition to the
people.
basil
At a pinch madame,
I can be a little peculiar myself.
julie
It begins to be something of which I am aware. I have heard
that you are
savage. Is it so?
basil
Not at all. I have a certain influence with my family, but
the
state does not
like me.
At this point, he goes on to explain
his encounter with “peoples in places of dictatorship” (i.e. the local school
board). But the passage also clearly suggests Basil’s interest in her, and she
in him. The act ends indeed in a kind a double
entendre as Julie suggests “I am willing you should play a little,”
suggesting that she might hear him play a hymn upon the organ they have their
home; but with the end of that sentence, “but—I am noted for my detours!” hints
that the “playing” and “organ” might mean something else. Basil’s command to
his daughter, “Show that splendor to bed!” makes his desires, if not
intentions, quite clear.
But the second scene of Act I, it is not Basil who visits Julie’s bed,
but Gustava, who snuggles up to Julie before pouring out a biography of the
woman as she has been following her for years in fan magazines. Indeed, perhaps
she has been following the career of the diva, since she is seen in another
moment of the play as cutting out a picture from a magazine, several of which
are posted on the Born walls. The vision she has of the grand lady is almost an
inhuman one:
Wait, don’t laugh.
It is like this: You were born. You were laid
in a bassinet, you
did not cry. You learned to walk before other
children, you
watched everything, and then one day, when you
were three or
four, you realized that you were terrible, a child
of destiny.
As Julie quickly perceives, Gustava
is not quite simple country girl she appears to be, soon moving even closer to
the beautiful woman: “Let me put my head on your arm, your perfume is so
strong, and so sweet—“ And by the end of their long conversation, she has
hinted that Julie must come to terms with her—and her brothers—with Julie
suggesting “I have never reckoned with children,” and Gustava responding, “Now
you have to it, we are here, wat are you going to do?” Julie sends her away.
The second act begins with an extended conversation between Gustava and
Costa, in which recounts her morning activities to the girl, both admitting
their admiration for her (“She is beautiful.”). When, soon after, Julie
approaches Gart in an attempt to the seemingly shy twenty-year-old out by
describing her own past selves, Costa ends their conversation by striking his
brother, the two of them violently wrestling, while Julie looks on, clearly
recognizing the emotion chaos she has created in them: “It has begun.”
In the second scene of Act II, Barnes again creates a strangely
ambiguous sexual scene, wherein Gart, troubled and unable to sleep, crawls into
his father’s bed, querying him about the dazzling visitor in their house (“Is
Julie von Bartmann a good woman?” “Beautiful, damaged, there more beautiful.”
Finally moving to his own perceived condition, “What is passion in man?”)
The father, strongly demeaning Julie, is quite obviously trying, as he
puts it, “trying to make Gart safe for tragedy.” Nothing, however, can calm the
excited young man, who almost dares his father to kill him (“No, you must
finish my life. You have begun it and you must see it through.”) before he
threatens either suicide or murder: “I have come to something that I do not
understand, or only in one way, I think it would not be your way. …Whether I
must kill myself, or you.”
There is only one way this tragedy can now play out. For the first time
in the elder Born’s life, he has meant less to a woman than his now
nearly-grown children. At the age of 50, time has changed everything. In an
attempt to demand she chose him, what he describes as demanding “victory,” she
fends off his invitation to his bed off, ultimately proclaiming she prefers
“the shy, gentle elder son, half musician, half human.”
By the end of the play, Born has shot himself, dying before the towering
Julie, while Gustav demands the intrude leave:
Go, go, it is all over. You see
what he has managed—accomplished. Go,
go, take everything and go. You
see yourself—we are reunited—we need
nothing—it is all
finished—settled.
Leaving, Julie’s slightly
inexplicably reply, “Immense! Immense!”, seems to suggest she perceives Born’s
act as a sort of sacrifice, an attempt to keep his family as a tightly knit
unit opposed to the ridiculousness of other’s lives. Yet one can only wonder if
his act is not also a highly selfish one, the act of, as he describes himself,
the Beast, desperate to hold onto what he has created and his insufferable
pride.
Barnes does not answer the question, but
surely we recognize, at play’s end, the father’s symbolic death, which closes
both his and Julie’s biography, freeing these isolated orphans to enter the
world, to now lead their own lives, if slightly wary of the foolishness that
may face them. And in that sense, Barnes’ theatrical family drama, ends, like
Chekhov plays, with a somewhat comedic, rather than tragic, resolution.
Los Angeles, January 15, 2013
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2013).
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