Indeed, the Almanack revises not only language but Western culture, creating alternatives to patriarchal ritual, dogma, and myth. “February” presents an outsized icon of Dame Musset with a list of the reasons why she has been “Sainted”—including what I see as another spoof on The Well of Loneliness in which Stephen Gordon’s love for a maid with housemaid’s knee is turned into the young Evangline’s learning “how the Knee termed Housemaid’s is come by, when the Slavy was bedridden at the turn of the scullery and needed a kneeling-to” (15). “June” recounts the “Fourth Great Moment of History”—revising the “three great moments” Matthew O’Connor posits in chapter 49 of Ryder and recasting the Bible to unite the Queen of Sheba and Jezebel (41). And the “March” discussion about men that reverses Thomas Aquinas’s inquiry in the Summa Theologica is sealed by a gynocentric creation myth in which mother-angels, gathered “so close that they were not recognizable, one from the other,” produce nine months later “the first Woman born with a Difference” (24–26). Here and elsewhere one sees the kind of discourse currently associated with “French feminists” like Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous and with the notion of écriture féminine, the “Difference” a matter not of gender in itself but of psychosexual identity.
All of these audacious and subversive stories prepare the way for Ladies Almanack’s final entry: the religious parody that recounts Dame Musset’s death and funeral. Dying virtually from her success (“she had blossomed on Sap’s need, and when need’s Sap found such easy flowing in the year of our Lord 19-what more was there for her to do?” [81]), Dame Musset asks her followers “of many Races and many Tempers” to honor her death each in her own way as each “loved me differently in Life” (82). Joined by “Women who had not told their Husbands everything” (83), Musset’s disciples witness the Pentecostal miracle that proves her sanctity:
They put her upon a great Pyre, and burned her to the Heart … And when they came to the ash that was left of her, all had burned but the Tongue, and this flamed, and would not suffer Ash, and it played about the handful that had been she indeed. (84)
Musset is to be the same tireless lover in death as in life, as “Skirts swirled in haste” and “some hundred Women were seen bent in Prayer” (84). Revising a story Dr. O’Connor tells in Ryder in which a man’s member outlives him, and rewriting The Well of Loneliness’s language of martyrdom in which the “stigmata” of the “invert” are compared to the wounds of Christ, 30 this ribald finale is also, like Irigaray’s double play in “When Our Lips Speak Together,” a serious reclamation of the sexual and verbal tongue. No finale could be more appropriate for the intricate discourse of Ladies Almanack, a text that speaks in tongues.
There are, to be sure, less exuberant moments in Ladies Almanack. Like all Barnes’s work, this one is preoccupied with questions of time and death, with the powers and dangers of sexuality, with ambivalence about women and indeed about human possibility. But those who focus on the occasions of homophobic doubt or internalized sexism in Ladies Almanack might well read it against its more chaste if differently daring 1928 sister-text, The Well of Loneliness. Written for a large audience of middle-class heterosexuals with the express purpose of securing homosexual “tolerance,” The Well of Loneliness could not afford to take the risks in language, plot, and ideology available to Barnes. In Hall’s novel, Natalie Barney is the exceptional courageous lesbian who shores her homosexual sisters and brothers against the overwhelming tragedy of “inversion,” pitting herself valiantly but unsuccessfully against a glum, despairing lot who hang out in shoddy bars, drink too much, and wait for the next suicide. By contrast, the privately published Ladies Almanack is both overwhelmingly positive and startlingly sexual. The book’s cryptic verbal flourishes — excessive even for Barnes — seem to me designed to distract potential censors from just this boldness, for as the text reminds us, certain things “could be printed nowhere and in no Country, for Life is represented in no City by a Journal dedicated to the Undercurrents, or for that matter to any real Fact whatsoever” (34). Barnes’s lesbian writing would “loom the bigger if stripped of its Jangle,” but must go “drugged” instead, “twittering so loud upon the Wire that one cannot hear the Message. And yet!” (46). Such “Jangle”—and the fate of Hall’s courageous Well of Lonelinessy—suggest how difficult commercial publication of Ladies Almanack would have been even in the seemingly enlightened Paris of 1928.
The celebratory impulses of Ladies Almanack are also dimmed by the hindsight of Nightwood, a far bleaker and more disturbing text. Like most earlier readers of Barnes, I came to Ladies Almanack through Nightwood, enchanted by its lush language and extraordinary images, riveted by the drama of Nora’s love for Robin and by Matthew O’Connor’s eccentricity, confused between the novel’s matter-of-fact focus on homosexuals and the disastrous fate of its lesbian relationships. But Nightwood is the work of another personal and political moment. If Ladies Almanack is a book of “rupture,” of écriture féminine, Nightwood “shines a cold light on the fear of alternative sexualities and the forces of their repression.”31 If Ladies Almanack celebrates the lesbian body, Nightwood sees sexuality as more bondage than bond. Barnes was of course writing out in Nightwood her painful separation from her own Night Wood as well as her disillusionment with Europe as the high joy of high modernism yielded to the spread of fascism and the imminence of war.
I want to speculate that the pain reflected in Nightwood and wrought by the political and personal events of the 1930s converged with overwhelming power to break Djuna Barnes’ artistic heart. She wrote in a letter to Peter Hoare in 1963 that there were “professional” writers who could continue under any circumstances, but that her “kind” were less predictable: “the ‘passion spent,’ and even the fury — the passion made into Nightwood the fury (nearly) exhausted in The Antiphon … what is left? ‘The horror,’ as Conrad put it.” 32 After her return to New York she seems to have continued living mentally in pre-war Paris, not with the cheerful nostalgia of a Kay Boyle or a Janet Flanner, but with despair and bitterness, as if she had left behind not only an extraordinary community but her own extraordinariness as well. Although she had criticized expatriate culture while she lived within it, in her later years she wrote and spoke of Paris with sad longing for a golden age, and when Cocteau and Piaf died in 1963 she wrote to Barney that “our legendary time is being calendared.”33 The Antiphon is certainly her angriest work, with its agonized family relationships and its tormented, sexually victimized heroine Miranda who may be a figure for the young daughter of Wald Barnes; it is also the work that took her longest to produce, and after it she became virtually unable to complete a new project though she continued writing multiple drafts mostly of poetry.