INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN SNIADER LANSER
If Djuna Barnes were still among us, it is not certain that a new edition of Ladies Almanack would be seeing print. She claimed to have written it “in an idle hour,” as a “jollity” for a “very special audience.” Its first publication in 1928 was a private affair financed by friends, including the book’s own mock-heroine; when its distributor Edward Titus backed out at the last moment, it was hawked by Barnes and her cohorts on Paris streets. Forty years later, when Farrar, Straus issued her Selected Works, Barnes did not offer them Ladies Almanack. To Natalie Clifford Barney, who repeatedly urged her old friend to “let that side of us” be memorialized, she wrote that the work was too “salacious” and “trifling” to be in print. She did assure Barney that the Almanack would be included in any edition of her complete works, and in order to protect it from the piracy that had already befallen her Book of Repulsive Women she allowed Harper and Row to reissue it with a new Foreword in 1972; but when that edition sold out Barnes professed herself relieved. I do not imagine that she would have welcomed association with a series on lesbian life and literature; she apparently feared her lesbian admirers would make her famous for Ladies Almanack rather than for Nightwood, which she considered her great book. Besides, Barnes supposedly told her late-life friend Hank O’Neal, “I don’t want to make a lot of little lesbians.”1
Yet this book which its author came to dismiss as a “slight satiric wigging” unfit to stand among her “serious works” is now recognized as both a brilliant modernist achievement and the boldest of a body of writings produced by and about the lesbian society that flourished in Paris between the turn of the century and the Second World War. Apparently conceived to amuse Barnes’s lover Thelma Wood during an illness, the book had as its first readers its own cast of characters, women associated with the wealthy American writer Natalie Barney, dubbed “I’Amazone” by the poet Rémy de Gourmont, whose salon on the Rue Jacoh was a center of both literary exchange and lesbian friendship for more than half a century.
Djuna Barnes’s ambivalences about Ladies Almanack, about the lesbian culture it parodies and celebrates, about the reputation of her writings and the public’s image of her “very very private” self, begin to reveal the complexity of this significant American writer who was virtually the last of the Paris expatriate modernists when she died just after her ninetieth birthday in 1982. That she came almost to disavow a book certainly written and illustrated with craft and energy (she even colored fifty copies by hand) also suggests some of the tensions between the “early” and “later” Djuna Barnes. The first seems to have been an unconventional, outspoken, and self-possessed artist-writer-journalist who left Greenwich Village for Paris around 1920 to make a reputation for original, dazzling, and sometimes formidable styles both literary and personal (as William Burroughs put it, “one sentence, and you know it is Djuna’2). She was renowned as much for her pride, her singularity, and her acerbic wit as for her highly regarded novels and stories from the prize-winning “A Night Among the Horses” (1918) to the bawdy, briefly best-selling Ryder (1928) to the astonishing Nightwood (1936), prefaced by T. S. Eliot and now considered a classic of modernist literature.
Yet this woman who earned Janet Flanner’s praise as “the most important woman writer” among the Paris Americans returned to the United States around 1940 not only at the height of her reputation but in the depths of disillusionment. Her relationship with Thelma Wood (and perhaps all intimacy) was definitively finished, her beloved Europe was already shattering beneath a cataclysmic war, and her years in England, writing Nightwood under Peggy Guggenheim’s patronage, had been lonely and difficult. She managed to publish only one work (the verse play The Antiphon in 1958) during the second half of her long life; she lived in poverty, seclusion, and ultimately great physical pain in a tiny apartment in New York’s Patchin Place, her pride turned haughty and her wit embittered. Though she was sometimes still capable of extraordinary charm, she had become, in Mary Lynn Broe’s words, “a malcontent crone in a world fast going to the dogs.”3 Ever more disappointed that her work was not better known, she nonetheless seems to have resented the intrusion of critics (“idiots”) and disparaged the feminist, lesbian, and gay scholars who were helping to secure her place in modern literature. She claimed to be shocked by the sexual mores of the seventies and insisted repeatedly, “I’m not a lesbian; I just loved Thelma.”
These dissonances between the “early” and “late” Barnes seem to me more than personal; they reflect historical differences between expatriate France in the 1920s and the repatriated postwar United States, where a vulgarized psychoanalysis was pressed into the service of an aggressively heterosexual social program, idealized in suburban motherhood, that spawned the malaise Betty Friedan would define in the 1960s as “the problem that has no name.” It is thus not accidental that the reputation of Ladies Almanack paralleled that of Barnes herself. A singular, irreverent, and often ambiguous book that delighted for decades the people it parodied, Ladies Almanack had an early notoriety in avant-garde circles, which soon bought up the 1050 copies printed in 1928, but it was unknown to the larger public for some forty years and was overlooked by early scholars of Barnes’s work who read Nightwood as a paradigmatic modernist novel epitomizing such notions as “spatial form.”4 Except for a few critics like Kenneth Burke, whose “Version, Con-, Per-, and In-” so outraged Barnes that she would not permit Burke to quote from her novel, most of the distinguished scholars who praised Nightwood during the 1950s and 1960s ignored the homosexual content of Barnes’s work.5
During these years, Barnes could hardly have worried about being known for Ladies Almanack. Even in 1972 the book was greeted more with perplexity than praise; allegedly the New York Times tried three reviewers, all of whom claimed they were unable to decipher it. Despite Barnes’s professed contempt for public approval, she was pained by this reaction and complained to her editor Frances McCullough that she felt people’s interest in her was sheerly prurient: they wanted her “upside down on 42nd Street, with my skirt over my head and my bum in the air.”6 But Harper and Row may simply have reprinted too soon: in 1972 the first “Second Wave” books about lesbians — Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon’s Lesbian/Woman and Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love’s Sappho Was a Right-On Woman—were just appearing, and even Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle was a year away. As McCullough wrote ruefully, had Ladies Almanack been published a few years later, a “celebration” would have “greeted the book.”7
Sure enough, by the late 1970s — ironically at the moment when Ladies Almanack was once more going out of print — the book began to receive public attention and to spark lively critical debate. At the same time, Barnes’s interviews and early stories were being published through the auspices of Douglas Messerli’s Sun & Moon Press, and St. Martin’s soon reissued Ryder. These newly available texts challenged the evolutionary pattern of criticism that had seen Barnes’s work before Nightwood merely as a prelude to one great accomplishment. This renewed interest in Barnes generally and in Ladies Almanack in particular may be associated with feminist criticism’s revisionary inquiry into modernism and with the growth of gay and lesbian criticism in the United States. Indeed, the new scholarship provides contexts for “decoding” Ladies Almanack that make the book seem far less cryptic today than it might have appeared to readers two decades earlier. And although the Almanack is deeply bound to a British literary tradition from Chaucer through Fielding and Sterne to the Victorians, and intimately tied to a historically situated community that has left more lesbian writing than any previous group, Ladies Almanack is also delightfully compatible with certain writings by “Second Wave” lesbians. With this new edition, then, one of Djuna Barnes’s finest, most original creations takes a firm place both in her own extraordinary oeuvre and in the growing body of new and recovered lesbian literature.