Djuna Barnes’s writing is unusual — and unusually daring — even among modernists. This may be because, while most modernist writers left home to escape convention, Barnes’s upbringing was unconventional from the start. What she escaped when she joined the artistic circles of Greenwich Village and Paris was a determinedly “bohemian” family that we would now also call dysfunctional. Born on June 12, 1892, Barnes grew up in Cornwall-on-Hudson and Long Island, New York, the second of five children and only daughter of Elizabeth Chappell, a British student of music, and Wald Barnes, an eccentric writer, artist, and virtual bigamist who forsook his own patronym of Budington to take his mother’s maiden name. In a household not only sexually unconventional but exploitative and probably abusive as well, young Djuna — (mis)named for the character Djalma in Eugène Sue’s novel The Wandering Jew—was parented, protected, and schooled by her grandmother Zadel Barnes Budington Gustafson, a feminist, spiritualist, published poet and novelist. If Ryder is as autobiographical as some critics have alleged, its plot bears mentioning: it involves a divorced matriarch named Sophia whose sexually profligate son Wendell Ryder brings to the family homestead first a wife and then a mistress, with each of whom he has children; eventually, after legal difficulties over the children’s truancy from school, the wife sacrifices herself by letting the mistress’s family become the “legitimate” one. Beneath its parodic humor, playful digressions, and picaresque form, Ryder is also the story of a young girl’s confusion in a sexually complicated household where women pay the price.
Like Ryder’s children, the Barnes siblings were schooled primarily at home. Under Zadel’s tutelage, Djuna read widely and deeply and is said to have all but memorized the dictionary. At seventeen, after her parents’ separation, she married Percy Faulkner, a much older man and the brother of Wald Barnes’s second wife; there is virtually no information about the fate of this marriage or about the next three years of Barnes’s life except that by 1911 she was publishing poetry. In 1912 she began both art studies at Pratt Institute and a reporting job for the Brooklyn Eagle, inaugurating a twenty-year journalistic career that yielded dozens of news reports, features, essays and interviews for a variety of New York newspapers and magazines. Often accompanied by her own drawings, these pieces directed to a wide readership share with Barnes’s more esoteric literary writings a penchant for startling phrases and images, boldness of vision and unconventionality of voice, philosophical complexity, preoccupation with death and sexuality, and interest in what Nancy Levine calls “the unexpected presence of the bizarre embedded in the everyday.”8 Best known among her wide-ranging news features is an article for World Magazine for which Barnes had herself force-fed — and photographed in the process — in order to stir public outrage against the treatment of imprisoned hunger-striking British suffragists. Several pieces published under the pseudonym Lydia Steptoe parody conventional expectations for women in ways that foreshadow Ladies Almanack: “Against Nature” mocks the notion that babies justify a woman’s existence, and “The Diary of a Dangerous Child” creates a narrator who, unable to decide whether to “place myself in some good man’s hands and become a mother,” or “become wanton and go out in the world and make a place for myself,” ends up rejecting this age-old dichotomy by deciding “to run away and become a boy.”9
Many of Barnes’s journalistic pieces are interviews with public figures from Lillian Russell, Billy Sunday, and Coco Chanel to Alfred Stieglitz, D. W. Griffith, and James Joyce. Barnes considered Joyce the greatest of living writers, and their works of the 1920s show marked similarities. She was a frequent dinner guest at Joyce’s flat and allegedly the only person he allowed to call him “Jim.” Ladies Almanack was published by the same press, Darantière in Dijon, that had printed Ulysses, and it was rumored that Joyce gave Barnes a manuscript of Ulysses which she reluctantly sold below its value in one of her many moments of poverty. In the interview that occasioned Barnes’s meeting with Joyce, she quotes his comment that “great talkers” speak “in the language of Sterne, Swift, or the Restoration.” This is certainly true of the “great talkers” in Barnes’s own work, most obviously the larger-than-life, Irish-American homosexual prophet Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grainof-salt-Dante-O’Connor, whose voice is so powerful a presence in Ryder and Nightwood.
But Barnes was writing fiction, plays, and poetry well before she went to Paris and met James Joyce during the furor over Ulysses in 1922. Her chapbook of eight poems and five drawings, The Book of Repulsive Women, was published in 1915 to scant critical notice by a rather seamy entrepreneur named Guido Bruno, and she began around the same year to publish short stories in both literary and popular magazines. She received rather more attention for her one-act plays, produced by the avant-garde Provincetown Players, whose most famous writers included Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, experimentalists among whom Barnes still stood out for the subversive unconventionality of her themes, language, and characters. Before she left for Paris she had begun publishing in the Little Review, and she accumulated enough material by the early twenties to publish an eclectic collection of poems, drawings, fiction, and plays that she called simply A Book (1923).
Biographers have not fully established Barnes’ personal history during those years from 1912 to about 1920 when she wrote and published primarily in New York. By Andrew Field’s account she was married for two years to a left-wing writer named Courtenay Lemon (Field does not mention Percy Faulkner), had numerous affairs with other men including the painter Marsden Hartley, and may have been sexually involved with women as well. Certainly Barnes loved deeply the poet Mary Pyne, who died around 1919 of tuberculosis and to whose memory she dedicated a set of poems. Whatever her personal sexuality during this period, Barnes was almost from the beginning of her career creating lesbian subtexts, usually in semicoded language, in her work. One of her first published stories, “Paprika Johnson” (1915), represents two “bosom friend[s]” who share bed, affections, work, and loyalties. When Leah announces that she is about to marry, Paprika asks her not to “let him know anything about it — ever — me, I mean. And if, after you are married I can do anything, just whoop and I’ll be there.” Leah’s answer comes “from the depths of the bed and Paprika’s warm arm” (40).