The picaresque hero of Ladies Almanack is the aristocratic Dame Evangeline Musset, her last name evoking the Romantic poet Alfred de Musset, celebrant of love who was also, disastrously, a lover of George Sand; her first name recalling both her American origins and her missionary zeal. The book is structured as a monthly chronicle, a form Barnes later continued in her magazine columns in Playgoers Almanack and Knickerbocker Almanack. Within the frame of the calendar, Ladies Almanack embeds both a picaresque fable of Dame Musset’s life from birth to death and a variety of “digressions” that appropriate Western traditions and rewrite patriarchal texts, as if anticipating Monique Wittig’s call to women in Les Guérillères to “remember, or failing that, invent.” The book is boldly and bawdily illustrated, like Ryder primarily through an iconography drawn from Pierre Louis Duchartre and Rene Saulnier’s 1925 collection of engravings and woodcuts, L’imagérie populaire. These drawings inaugurate a departure in Barnes’s visual artistry from the fin-de-siècle high-art expressionist drawings of the ‘teens, with their angular emphasis on the somber and the grotesque, to the curvaceous representations, at once sensuous and humorous, that will dominate Barnes’s graphic art for years to come.15
By identifying its author only as a “Lady of Fashion” and its main character as “Dame,” the book recognizes and perhaps mocks Barney’s wealthy status and at the same time turns the traditionally chaste figure of the “lady” into a lesbian: all “ladies” should carry this Almanack, “as the Priest his Breviary, as the Cook his Recipes, as the Doctor his Physic, as the Bride her Fears, and as the Lion his Roar!”(9). It has been suggested that the Almanack form was inspired by the legend that James Joyce was never without his book of saints, but Barnes may also have known the eighteenth-century English journal LADIES Diary or Woman’s ALMANACK, which has a subtitle almost as elaborate as her own. Barnes might at the same time have been responding to a famous line from her allegedly favorite book, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), as if to show just what would happen in a future where “women wear the breeches” in “a world turned upside downward.”16 The Almanack responded to contemporary literature as well. In her 1972 Foreword Barnes placed it “neap-tide to the Proustian chronicle,” and certainly the women in Barney’s circle had sharply criticized Proust’s representation of lesbians in the Sodom and Gomorrah section of Remembrance of Things Past. Barnes may also have been “correcting” Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness, which appeared in July of 1928 and which features Natalie Barney as “Valérie Seymour.” And there are echoes of Ryder in Ladies Almanack that go beyond their shared Rabelaisian iconography.
The language of Ladies Almanack is as varied and complex as its generic mixture: a dense and highly allusive prose enshrouded in capital letters that speaks sometimes clearly, sometimes cryptically. Archaisms and neologisms are oddly allied; plain modern English coexists with ornate Elizabethan; esoteric words are juxtaposed with blunt Anglo-Saxon; antecedents get misplaced, verbs dangle, pronouns lose their source. Like the writings of Gertrude Stein, Ladies Almanack is bent on serious nonsense — and like Stein’s probably embeds a host of private allusions that may never be unlocked, so it seems wise to take Barnes’s advice to “honour the creature slowly,” savoring rather than belaboring such phrases as “she thaws nothing but Facts” (37); “Outrunners in the thickets of prehistoric probability” (43); or “two creatures sitting in Skull” (51). Resonating with the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, Sterne, and Fielding, Ladies Almanack seems bent on writing lesbian experience into English Literature.
Exactly how Barnes’s book should be called “lesbian” remains, however, a subject of inquiry. The book’s perspective and tone are by no means unambiguous, and the “meaning” of Ladies Almanack has become a site of lively critical debate. Is the book a light parody or a bitter attack? Is it a celebration or a condemnation of Barney and her community? Does it revise or repeat the tropes of homophobic ideology? The few critics of the 1960s and early 1970s who discussed the book at all saw it as a critique of the community it parodies. James Scott — possibly influenced by the “later” Barnes, who cast a censoring eye over his critical study — calls it a protest against “the absurdity of female promiscuity,” “the sterility of the sisterhood,” and “the absence of decent restraints of privacy,” as if it were a document of Victorian morality.17 Louis Kannenstine finds moments of “Sapphic manifesto” in Ladies Almanack but sees its humor as “surface levity” concealing a “pain-racked comedy” documenting the “horror” of “coming back upon oneself.”18 Emphasizing its positive vision, Andrew Field nonetheless calls it “a queer little book” whose “finest portions are about melancholy.”19 In sharp contrast, Bertha Harris hailed the 1972 Ladies Almanack as “a document of lesbian revolution” and Catharine Stimpson recently insisted that “Barnes is clear-tongued about lesbianism. No one would mistake the ebullient Ladies Almanack … for a handbook about the joys of heterosexuality.”20 To my 1979 essay reading Ladies Almanack as a text of celebration, other critics have responded with varying degrees of assent and difference.21 Shari Benstock concurs that Ladies Almanack is “not a satire at the expense of lesbianism or of such groups as Natalie Barney established” and that it “deplores the treatment of women in the heterosexual world.”22 Cheryl Plumb sees the work as part celebration and part inquiry into “opposing ideas of love, sexuality, and the role of the artist and imagination.”23 For Frann Michel, however, the book “is always potentially compromised by that which it subverts.”24 And Karla Jay, in perhaps the most oppositional reading, has argued that Ladies Almanack is a bitter attack on the upper-class Barney, who doled handouts to Barnes and other women artists who had insufficient means of support. For Jay, many of the details in Ladies Almanack that I find to be lighthearted parodies or inside jokes are vituperous jibes at Barney and such other figures as Radclyffe Hall that distort their values and represent lesbianism in “reductionist” ways.25 If Ladies Almanack is indeed an attack on its own characters, many of them seem to have missed the point: Janet Flanner loved the book and boasted of her inclusion; Solita Solano wrote in 1967 that she had “reread ‘Ladies Almanack’ and had nearly forgotten how charming and amusing it is”; and Barney wrote throughout the sixties that “Your ‘Ladies Almanack’ is a constant joy to me” and that “I have just reread your ‘Ladies Almanack’ with new finds and delights.”26
Mediating these divergent readings, Benstock notes that Ladies Almanack’s satire necessarily “cuts both ways”: while the book is addressed to “a small and select audience of lesbians,” still “the attitudes supporting its satire belong to the modernist mainstream, which in general hated Sapphism and in particular resented the wealth and leisure of this group.”27 Without question, Ladies Almanack is often irreducibly ambiguous, its narrative voice evasive and devious—“a Maze, nor will we have a way out of it” (58). Each reader, then, will have to construct it (as, of course, we construct all texts) after his or her desire.