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.

Orhan Pamuk | My Name Is Red / 2001

the smell of death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Orhan Pamuk My Name Is Red, translated from the Turkish by Erdağ M. Göknar (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001)

 

 Orhan Pamuk's 1998 novel, My Name Is Red, first published in English translation earlier this year, is both a history about art in the Arab world, and a story of a culture's erasing of that very history. Set in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Turkey, Pamuk's work is also a love story embedded in a mystery. Before the book is over two important Ottoman Court painters are killed, and the murderer decapitated. And, at the same time, the spiritual and intellectual struggles behind these events bring an end to the long tradition of miniaturist book illumination, jewels in Islam art.

 

    Pamuk's great gift of storytelling allows him to write a story that explains and admires the long tradition, while still questioning it. Simultaneously, through the multiple perspectives of his fiction, he reveals both the great love (often homosexual) between the miniaturists and the leaders of the court studios, while exploring the often brutal treatment of the younger miniaturists and their own struggles and plots to outshine one another and win over the adoration of their master.

     Further, this complex tapestry of Turkish history is centered in a love story between a "potential" widow, Shekure—her husband has failed to return from the warfront—and a former painter, Black, who has just returned from battle. Black, who for years worked with Shekure's father, Enishte Effendi, has long been in love with Shekure. But her marriage to another, resulting in her two children, has made it difficult for him to express that love.

 

    Traditionally, Shekure would have stayed with her husband's family until her husband's body was found or officially declared dead. In this case, however, Shekure's brother-in-law is determined to marry her, and, confused by that situation, she returns to her father's home.

     Earlier in the book, another of the painters, Master Elegant Effendi, has been killed. Now suddenly as Black and Shekure vow their love for one another, Enishte Effendi, Shekure's father, is found dead. Black, we know, is innocent. Who among Enishte's group is guilty: Olive, Buttterfly, or Stork?

     The couple quickly hold a funeral for Enishte. Finding a preacher who will declare Shekure's husband dead, the two marry soon after. But their troubles have just begun. The former husband's family insists she must return to them, and the authorities, who suspect Black, are determined to torture all the painters until one confesses. In Shekure's house and elsewhere there is an overpowering smell of death.

     Joining forces with the great Master Osman, head of the Sultan's studio, Black studies the Sultan's great library of manuscripts in search of a painting style—in this case the flared, open nostrils of a horse—learned by one of the miniaturists at an early point in his studies that reveals the identity of the criminal. What they discover remains vague; in some respects, Master Osman cannot truly believe the murderer could be any of his beloved students. Yet what they witness in these books is the entire history of Islamic painting, pictures that, unlike those of Western artists (which the characters refer to as "Frankish influences"), utilize stylized scenes and figures based on the earliest of the masters, with only slight shifts in form and line over the thousands of years.

     While pondering these great books, Master Osman blinds himself in the tradition of the numerous masters who in their dedication to their art have gone blind. And Black is basically left alone to uncover the culprit.

     All of this is made even more complicated by the outcries of several religious groups in the city against the work of the illuminators, and, in particular, against the painters secretly gathered by Enishte Effendi, who himself has seen the Frankish artists and, purportedly, has been influenced by them, which is most evident, so it is believed, in the last missing picture, stolen by the murderer himself.

     I have often been accused in these volumes of revealing the entire stories of the books I discuss (their plots are seldom what motivates my reading and love of these works), but, in this one case, I will leave the discovery of that murderer to future readers of My Name Is Red. It hardly matters, moreover. Although Shekure's and Black's marriage survives, the incidents described in this book have brought an end to the miniaturist tradition, at least in Turkey. The Western styles of art have won out against the traditions expressed in these manuscripts. Sultan Ahmet I, who follows the beneficent sultan of this work, is opposed to any work of art, even destroying a large clock with statuary sent to him by Queen Elizabeth I. The beautifully artful expressions of the Koran and folktales described in Pamuk's fiction are suddenly doomed to be forgotten, some are destroyed.

     Even more importantly, a whole way of seeing the world has been altered. The abstractions of the miniaturists have been replaced by self-expression; art in subservience to belief is exchanged for an art that expresses the artist and his subjects.

 

Los Angeles, December 16, 20001