Djuna Barnes | Collected Poems; With Notes Toward the Memoirs / 2005

sleeping with the dogs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Djuna Barnes Collected Poems; With Notes Toward the Memoirs, edited by Phillip Herring and Osías Stutman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005)

 

Let me begin by saying it’s wonderful to have Barnes’s Collected Poems finally in hand. I immediately must qualify that enthusiasm, however, by admitting that when editor Phillip Herring first proposed such a collection to me years ago, I demurred. Barnes is one of the great authors of the twentieth century, but her poetic talents are best expressed in her fiction and drama; like Joyce, her works described as poems seem oddly conservative, if only because her language has always been closer to the sixteenth and seventeenth century traditions. Her carefully wrought, often rhymed stanzas, accordingly, seem ploddingly old-fashioned when compared with Williams, Stein, Moore, even the more conservative Cummings—other writers of her own generation. The final poetic works, moreover—writing to which she devoted herself almost exclusively during her last years—were so intensely overworked that, to my eye, it seemed nearly impossible to determine which versions were to have been her final choices. The manuscripts housed at the University of Maryland library were densely written over, words and lines crossed out, associations and sources scribbled throughout the margins, so that any editor would face a near-impossible task in preparing a definitive text. Neither Herring nor Stutman seem to me to possess the understanding of poetry to succeed, and despite their brave attempt, numerous questions about Barnes’s choices in these poems remain unanswered.

    The most annoying aspect of the University of Wisconsin’s publication, Collected Poems; With Notes Toward the Memoirs, are the editorial comments on her last poetic writings. While I appreciate the editors’ comments on various editorial issues, in which they compare different versions of the poems with the manuscript she had put aside as completed, and their references to sources are often helpful, it is truly a disservice to the poet to comment on or to interpret the poems—sometimes even mocking the poet’s concerns—in passages such as this:

 

             DB had her dictionary open to the “sp” section of this poem. She

             gives us words such as “spilth,” “spelth,” “splints,” “spiles,” and “spatch.”

             One has heard of “audacity” but not “caudacity.” The subject seems to be

             a mummified woman, what was found in the grave, and what it all meant.

 

     Certainly any editor might be encouraged to interpret the work at hand, but it seems inappropriate to make such obvious snipes against the poet’s methods and end in what is clearly a dismissal of the writing which most readers are encountering for the very first time.

     Often the editors are simply wrong-headed in their assessments of Barnes’s endeavors. At one point, for example, they observe that a poem (“Laughing Lamentations”) “seems to be a collection of images that do not quite cohere.” The poem (which Barnes evidently herself felt was incomplete, and enfolded within another longer poem) is indeed a very strange one; but the images do very much “seem to cohere”: a young woman, head bowed in a kind withheld laughter (“Laughter under-water”)—a product of some unspoken sorrow presumably related to failed love, since she has been “stung by mercury,”  (an image that calls up both the poisonous “quicksilver” and the God of messages and travel)—ends with a “new nativity”—the woman with bowed head is compared earlier to a “peasant in a praying stall”—a kind of new birth. The narrative voice, moreover, “bends upon himself”—in a manner that reminds one of Dr. O’Connor of Nightwood stealthily moving home through the Paris streets—suggesting another image of the bowed. In short, the images cohere, despite jumps in narrative logic. The poem works just fine as poetry, but is perhaps more confusing if read as a kind of narrative, which it appears the editors have interpreted it to be.

     On the very next page another poem is described as “on the verge of being a finished poem, but there are still obscurities to be ironed out.” One might ask, “Isn’t that the job of the reader and/or of critics?”

    The poem from Satires, “if some noble show…,” Herring and Stutman describe as “little more than a collection of phrases that might prove useful in a more focused poem.” There is no doubt that this poem is, in some sense, unfinished, but I find its radical similes and images some of the most arresting of her later work:

 

                        his tongue

                        Like the potters thumb reams out her mouth,

                        Sea-pig

                        To sing his own and plighted song

                        To sing his journey among drought voyaging

                        Among sea-groves

                        ….

 

      This Odysseus-like male does not allow the female figure even to speak, in the very act of what might be a kiss, stealing even her potential words to sing the story of his own voyage. If only all of Barnes’s late poems were so radically disjunctive and powerfully expressed!

     While it is wonderful to read some of Barnes’s “Notes Toward the Memoirs,” moreover, mightn’t that have been included in another book where it might feel more at home than in her only volume of Collected Poems? Here it seems simply attached, as if the editors felt that had yet another piece that might round out the volume.

     I am not arguing for a sense of generic purity! Barnes herself mixed fiction, art, and poetry in her early collection, A Book (1923), and included art in several of her works. Why then present the early poems of The Book of Repulsive Women without its accompanying drawings, images intensely related to these works? On the other hand, why does this book contain a series of photographs and three drawings, two of which have nothing to do with her poetry?

    These and other issues result in a sense of frustration rather than celebration for the publication of another volume in the oeuvre of one of the greatest of American authors.

    At their best, the poems reveal Barnes’s great love of language, her dark satiric wit, and reiterate her mythic, emblematic vision of mankind and its inevitable march towards self-destruction in its return to its bestial roots. Like Yeats’ “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor,” Barnes’s poetic work, particularly her poetic satires, presents a world of human beasts that is both utterly fascinating and terrifying:

 

                       When beasts hump backwards for the acts,

                       The scroll of heaven too retracts

                      

she writes in “Dereliction.” Indeed, from her earliest work on, her focus is the relationship of man to beast, her fascination with “the hem that dusts [her] ankles with its fur,” (“Vaudeville,” 1923). As she writes in “Lullaby,” first published in A Book, in a series of images that remind one of the ending of her fiction Nightwood of 1936:

 

                      When I was a young child I slept with a dog,

                      I lived without trouble and I thought no harm;

                      I ran with the boys and I played leap-frog;

                      Now it is a girl’s head that lies on my arm.

 

     It may be interesting to actually compare those images. For Barnes clearly is at her poetic best in passages such as these from that great fiction; and it is in these that we recognize her poetic achievement:

 

                     Then she began to bark also, crawling after him—barking in a fit of   

                     laughter, obscene and touching. The dog began to cry then, running

                     with her, head-on with her head, as if to circumvent her; soft and

                     slow his feet went padding. He ran this way and that, low down in

                     his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in

                     shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up,

                     lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the

                     dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head

                     flat along her knees.

 

Ultimately, Barnes’s world is not just a fallen one, but is a world inured to, perhaps even in love with, its destructiveness. Although Barnes was most certainly a modern woman, she was anything but a modernist, was a writer ill at ease in her own century. Sleeping with the dogs, returning to the beasts, was inevitable—preferable, perhaps—to sleeping with a man or woman who dooms one to Hell or to a life of hellish suffering:

 

                     Disintegration now is all as motion;

                     Yet cat-wise he will fall, all four feet down

                     On paradise, the upside down. (“There Should Be Gardens”)

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2006

Reprinted from Shadowtrain [England], No. 9 (October 2006).