In this mythical alchemy of Art she is forgotten. A heroine sacrificed on the plot of literature.
On a trip home to Chicago I go to the library of the Art Institute, my special collections partner in tow, to look at the Hans Bellmer books housed in the Mary Reynolds Collection, as I want to get closer to Unica Zürn, whose gorgeous novel/screen memory Dark Spring I just read. They didn’t have any of her materials, unsurprisingly. Mary Reynolds was DuChamp’s mistress, an ingenious bookbinder who also became close to the Baroness and helped her out at a time when almost everyone else had ostracized her (by then Duchamp had dumped Mary to marry an heiress). I always experience a sort of chilly, paternalistic air when in these rare books reading rooms, like they are worried your heat could somehow damage the immortal material. The tweedy rare books librarian doesn’t want me to touch the more fragile books. He voices his skepticism about how much of the vision behind these extraordinarily bound books are Reynolds’, he suggests that they are mostly Duchamp’s design, which he just told Reynolds what to do. Of course he thinks that. I mean, of course he thinks that. But it’s also a case of peddling — the items acquire more value being the brainchild of a great man, as opposed to his mistress.
I write notes in my notebook because I assume I’m supposed to.
I write: I am not a scholar.
I write also: I do not know French or German.
I also write down for some reason what I am wearing:
soft grey jacket with the high collar that is almost backless
black cloche hat
soft stretchy black pants (semi-harem) tucked into black boots
old old dark gray Hussein Chalayan cardigan, which has permanent pit stains
All my beautiful pieces I keep like in a museum, because I don’t want them ruined somehow by the stink or casualness of my body.
I leaf through old issues of Minotaure. The only female presence the gorgeous photos of Lee Miller and other Surrealist models, and Bellmer’s mechanical dolls.
I am realizing these muses of modernism were often objectified twice over, through literature and often through psychiatry (both reducing them to their BODY).
“She is the doll,” Hans Bellmer said when meeting Unica Zürn, marveling at her resemblance to his poupees. Later his photo of her naked bound torso on the cover of a Surrealist journal with the caption: Keep in a Cool Place. The meaning is clear: She is a piece of meat.
During the time I begin reading the biographies of the mad wives, stewing in my obsessions, feeling eerily like I was performing their lives, I write a letter to Poetry magazine about a review of Djuna Barnes’s posthumous poetry collection. Although I had previously written theater and book reviews, I think of this letter as one of my first acts of “criticism,” which for me always originates in feeling, in an angry protectiveness, especially towards my beloved women. The review begins by using Gertrude Stein’s condescending compliment of Barnes, the description of her lovely ankles, and continues to characterize Barnes as an It girl of the Left Bank, not Barnes the girl and genius, but a mere, pretty socialite flitting around the more serious Modernist writers. The reviewer also theorized that Eliot must have exposed her to John Donne and the rest of the metaphysical poets that he saw as inspiring her poetry. These are all small, slight dismissals, but the snarky details chosen add up to a dismissal of the work by focusing on Djuna Barnes’s looks, how others saw her, refusing to regard her as anything more than a dilettante, a novelty. This review was not the feting or canonizing of a genius, but the petting of a girl lucky to be on the periphery.
They published my heated letter valorizing Nightwood as one of the most important masterpieces of modernism, and taking issue with the reviewer’s characterization of her as a minor, flashy, accessory to some more significant scene, noting that Samuel Beckett regularly sent her money in her days of poverty later on in the Village because he was like others admiring of her genius, and that James Joyce let him call her “Jim” because he regarded her as a peer, not because she was some cute thing. Poetry then allowed the reviewer a rebuttal, something along the lines of: “I still conclude that Djuna Barnes is a minor writer.”
Ephemeral, denied the canon. Objectified by her slim ankles. I participate in my first Internet feud when the online literary blog HTMLGIANT publishes a satirical post about Zelda, written by the pithy punchline bully Jimmy Chen, whose schtick usually involves posting images with inane captions in an attempt to merge high-brow with hipster irony, a lit version of the Do’s and Don’ts in Vice magazine, the subtext often a disgust with the female body (such as his post pointing out the pronounced nipples of a female literature professor at an Ivy League). The photo is the one used on the back of Milford’s biography of the lovely numbed-out Zelda posed on a crate with her ballet slippers. Chen, operating out of the most caricatured outline of the Fitzgerald myth, rhapsodizes about Zelda’s cute folds of back fat in the photo and quips that he hopes the sheets were comfortable in the asylum (I wish I could quote it: it’s been taken down since, along with many of his offending posts). The snarky dismissal. I answer back with vitriol. It becomes heated, ugly. Personal. Slurs of a sexual nature slung in the comments section, mostly by a chauvinistic supporter of Chen’s. A way to bully, which is to humiliate, to silence, to make a woman smaller whose behavior is seen as outsized. (Won’t she fucking shut up?)
This is one of the first times I exhibit rage online, in the comments sections and in my blog, in those early months. I feel so protective of these women. I summon forth all my fury. Fellow bloggers, Angela Simione and Roz Ito, comment extensively, comforting me, rallying behind me, helping to contextualize my anger. (Our blogs serve as legitimizing networks for anger. The rant can be revenge, to get something off our chest about our place in the world. To break the silence, the silencing.)
Simone de Beauvoir who writes that the woman is always reduced to the body, regardless of how she situates herself. The photo of her. The one taken in Chicago. Après la bain. She grew hot after fucking Algren. Pinning her hair, she is standing in front of the mirror naked, except for high heels.
She has quite a rear on her, everyone said when the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur reposted the photos for what would be her 100th birthday. A delight in objectifying the ample rump of one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. As if to say: You are still the second sex. You will still disrobe and discard your intellect at the bedside table.