Djuna Barnes | Poe’s Mother: Selected Drawings of Djuna Barnes / 1995

poe’s mother: the drawings of djuna barnes

 

Djuna Barnes, Douglas Messerli, ed. Poe’s Mother: Selected Drawings of Djuna Barnes (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995)

The drawings of Djuna Barnes must be understood within the context of her writings. Most of the drawings in this volume were originally published in newspapers along with Barnes’s interviews, stories, dramas, and essays; her first four book publications also interweave image and language. Barnes published more than 350 drawings—the contents of this book represent only a fraction—most of them accompanied by her written texts. Even in her great Nightwood (1936), which contains no drawings, Barnes focuses much of her imagistic and structural concerns on linguistic descriptions of tableaux vivants, “living pictures.” Accordingly, it is impossible in the work of Djuna Barnes utterly to separate the visual from the linguistic. Her pen seems as ready to sketch visual images as it does to write down words.

     It is quite apparent that Barnes often spent time at her interviews sketching her subjects; the recorded conversations of her interviewees—always highly witty and artificial—suggest that she began with the visual and filled in with what she remembered of their discussions at a later date. Moreover, she continually redescribes, in language which is often radically abstract, the visual appearances of those with whom she had spoken. Arthur Voegtlin is “terribly tall, terribly thin. …I knew that he was a big man, and when a thing is big enough, like the Statue of Liberty or the Woolworth Tower, one does not stoop on the contrary, before great things the back of one’s head knows the shoulder blade.” Diamond Jim Brady: “I never fully believed in [him] until one summer, on a boardwalk evening, I caught sight of his breastwork lights. Shining out of the dark like a searchlight at sea, he bore down upon me, supreme under the dominance of three headlights, running slowly with the tide of the traffic, smiling out of heavy, condescending depths, which held off fiercely the banked, black eyebrows.”

     Barnes often begins her interviews with a description of the room, of the furniture, or of the street in which she has met her subject. She prefaces her interview with Yvette Guilbert with these comments:

 

         The pink chair of gray enameled wood rests on a carpet still a little

         heavier with shades of rose. The high screen, with its false plumed birds

         and its great rusty dahlias, stands aside just enough to expose the portrait

         of a small Parisienne in white gown and cupid-shaped straw hat, who,

         lifting her skirt ever so little with that conscious coquetry that always

         goes before an ankle, smiles at the gentleman leaning out of the latticed

         window.

 

     Barnes’ visual memory clearly is as prodigious and, perhaps, far stronger than her memory of language. When I met with Barnes in November 1973, she appeared to have forgotten the written appointment we had made; yet once the conversation had gotten under way, she easily recalled “a large bronze platter under which he sat,”* from her interview of David Belasco conducted in 1916. Three years later, she was outraged by my publication of one of her stories in my magazine, Sun & Moon: A Journal of Literature & Art, not because I had published it, but because the same issue contained what she thought was a nude portrait of myself.** Anyone who has read Nightwood, with Dr. O’Connor’s marvelous description of Nikka, a performer of the Cirque de Paris, will recognize how important the visual was to Djuna Barnes.

      Most significantly, the drawings and linguistic images Barnes created were not just decorative additions to the text, but were integral to it. Much of Barnes’s writing can be described as emblematic in the sense that both text and visual image are given equal weight, each comprehensible on its own terms, but together redefining and reshaping the other. Particularly in Nightwood, but in varying degrees in all her work, Barnes creates a hierarchical world—not unlike that of “The Great Chain of Being”—conveyed in linguistically-constructed visual images that determine her characters’ moral conditions and structurally engage her characters through their physical positions. The success of their communication and search for love depends on how they physically and morally carry themselves—symbolized by the act of bowing—in relation to one another: love is permitted only when the subservient individual “bows” or “kneels” before the individual of “higher” positions [see my essay on Nightwood that follows].

     Clearly, the vast majority of sketches and caricatures in this volume do not play that same role in relation to the texts with which they were published. Barnes was, after all, working in journalism with all the deadlines and artistic limitations of that form. In many instances the drawings served simply as snapshots. But Barnes quickly began to perceive the potential of her art, exaggerating her image and displacing the contemporaneity of the subjects by recasting them in fin de siècle contexts. Just as she used the work of Oscar Wilde as a benchmark for her dialogue, she turned to Aubrey Beardsley, who penned the drawings and the cover for Wilde’s publication of Salomé, for her art. The first drawing reproduced in this book is from 1913; two years later Barnes had begun to borrow the style of Beardsley and was even described in Bruno’s Weekly as “the American Beardsley.” Her style served to contextualize her subjects in a recent past, in a time before the looming threat and eventual outbreak of World War I. Like Beardsley in his own time, Barnes set her Greenwich Village bohemians, the figures of her early stories and plays, and even the noted dancer/poet/per-formance artist Valentine de Saint-Point, in a shrouded world of decadence, the latter an “art world” icon whose life was representative of everything that the realism of the New York streets were not.

     We can see the remnants of this Beardslian phase even in her works in the 1920s; but gradually, as she began to be billed as a caricaturist by the New York Tribune Magazine and Books, Barnes moved away from simple portraiture and turned to other sources such as emblem books, chapbooks, and almanacs of earlier centuries.*** By the late 1920s, from Ladies Almanack on, Barnes’s style radically changes, reflecting these sources. But the effect is similar; once again the imitation of older art forms takes her subjects out of a contemporary context and places them in a world of art. Depicted chatting across the twin beds of 1930, Lunt and Fontanne seem to be transported from their contemporary home life to slightly misshapen clouds in a sixteenth century sky. They are theater, Barnes seems to imply, no matter where they lie.

     Barnes’s art—both its visual and linguistic aspects—is a theatrical art, an art of exaggerations and extremes. But she uses those devices, just as had Wilde, to seek truth, to see through the masks and stances of human beings. Nowhere is this more apparent, perhaps, than in her drawings—in her sketches and depictions of figures from Twingeless Twitchell, striking his auditors with awe, to Poe’s mother, the forgotten creator of the master of grotesque.

 

Los Angeles, 1995

Reprinted from Poe’s Mother: Selected Drawings of Djuna Barnes (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995)

 

* A bronze platter is not described in her December 1916 interview with Belasco, “David Belasco Dreams.” But several objects in his artifact-laden apartment drew Barnes’s attention throughout the conversation, in particular a large ivory Christ, flanked on either side by “beautiful thieves.”

 

** Hank O’Neal, in his Barnes memoir, Life is painful, nasty and short….in my case it has been only painful and nasty, describes an event similar to this. However, he relates it to an editor requesting permission to use the interviews, not a story, which, in any event, was already published by the time I had sent the issue of Sun & Moon. Perhaps O’Neal is conjoining two different irritations in Barnes’s life. Michael Andre, editor of Unmuzzled Ox, did publish some interviews of Djuna Barnes; perhaps he wrote her for permission. In fact there was a nude portrait in the issue of Sun & Moon which included Barnes’s story, a portrait titled “Myself,” a self portrait—part of a portfolio of drawings—of the Washington, D.C., artist Joseph Shannon.

 

*** Barnes also painted, often using Medieval or Renaissance styles and techniques.