It is perhaps not irrelevant that during this same period in the 1960s and 1970s the woman who had once gleefully defined depravity as “the ability to enjoy what others shudder at and to shudder at what others enjoy” became a professed sexual conservative. She scrawled “filthy paper” in red ink on the back of the review in Gay of Ladies Almanack in which Michael Perkins praised her as “our greatest living writer”; she refused to restore the portions of Ryder that had been censored by her publisher in 1928; and she worried constantly that her work would be charged with “salaciousness.” I find plausible Hank O’Neal’s belief that Barnes feared her “association with lesbianism” had kept her work from being valued as art. Certainly T. S. Eliot had had difficulty getting Nightwood’s subject matter past Faber and Faber’s board of editors, and the distributor of Ladies Almanack had panicked about putting his name to the book even though it was published more or less privately and in a foreign tongue.
Djuna Barnes’s retrenchment makes Ladies Almanack and the happenstance of its publication all the more astonishing. Dame Musset’s story dances lightly on the dark surfaces of Barnes’s later life and work, offering a moment in which the troublesome questions of gender, love, and sexuality converge with more pleasure than suffering and with ideological implications far more radical and gynocentric than Barnes “herself” might have avowed. We may have to account for the vision of Ladies Almanack in the euphoric daring of a cultural moment for which Barnes — perhaps because she was writing privately and playfully — let herself be an articulating voice. It is a voice that does not seem to reappear in public until the 1970s, when some lesbian writers accepted the call of Hélène Cixous and Claudine Hermann to become “voleuses de langue,” to steal and fly with language. As Julia Penelope and Susan Robbins have noted, much lesbian humor works through this kind of theft, “‘playing off’ heterosexist assumptions and institutions,”34 subverting patriarchal folklore to lesbian ends. Alix Dobkin’s song “A, You’re an Amazon,” Jan Oxenberg’s film “A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts,” Judy Grahn’s fable “The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke,” Olga Broumas’s poem “Little Red Riding Hood” and Robin Morgan’s “Hansel and Gretel” are all works of the seventies that operate in this way.
With Gertrude Stein’s poetry, Ladies Almanack is one of the first English-language works of this century to write through the lesbian body, celebrating not simply the abstraction of a sexual preference but the erotic as power. Given Djuna Barnes’s personal reticence, one must be all the more grateful to her for leaving us this text that outlives the brief moment of her own assent. Like Dame Musset’s last ritual, Ladies Almanack stands witness to the pleasures and perils of speaking in tongues.
NOTES
1. Hank O’Neal, “Life is painful, nasty and short — in my case it has only been painful and nasty”: Djuna Barnes, 1978–1981: An informal memoir (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 120.
2. William Burroughs, in a letter to Mary Lynn Broe, 14 January 1985, cited in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 206.
3. Mary Lynn Broe, Introduction to Silence and Power, 6.
4. See, for example, Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” in his The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963).
5. Kenneth Burke, “Version, Con-, Per-, and In- (Thoughts on Djuna Barnes’s Novel Nightwood),” Southern Review 2 (1966): 329–46; rpt. in Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 240–53. “Perversion” also figures in Ulrich Weisstein’s “Beasts, Dolls, and Women: Djuna Barnes’s Human Bestiary,” Renascence 15 (Fall 1962): 3–11.
6. Quoted by Frances McCullough in Silence and Power, 366.
7. McCullough, ibid.
8. Nancy J. Levine, “‘Bringing Milkshakes to Bulldogs’: The Early Journalism of Djuna Barnes,” in Silence and Power, 28.
9. [Lydia Steptoe], “Diary of a Dangerous Child; Which Should Be of Interest to All Those Who Want to Know How Women Get the Way They Are,” Vanity Fair 18 (July 1922): 94.
10. Louis Kannenstine, The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 22.
11. Bertha Harris, “The More Profound Nationality of Their Lesbianism: Lesbian Society in Paris in the 1920’s.” In Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian Feminist Anthology, ed. Phyllis Birkby, Bertha Harris, Jill Johnston, Esther Newton, and Jane O’Wyatt (New York: Times Change Press, 1973), 79.
12. See Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 19001940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); and Benstock, “Paris Lesbianism and the Politics of Reaction, 1900–1940,” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1989), 332-46.
13. Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War (1930), quoted in Silence and Power, 36.
14. Broe, Introduction to Silence and Power, 5.
15. For a discussion of the influence of L’imagerie populaire, the illustrations of Ladies Almanack, and Barnes’ artistic career in general, see Frances M. Doughty, “Gilt on Cardboard: Djuna Barnes as Illustrator of Her Life and Work,” in Silence and Power, 137-54.
16. Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: Random House, 1977), 69.
17. James Scott, Djuna Barnes (Boston: Twayne, 1976), 79–80.
18. Kannenstine, The Art of Djuna Barnes, 53–54.
19. Andrew Field, Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes (New York: Putnam’s, 1983), 124, 127.
20. Catharine Stimpson, Afterword to Silence and Power, 371.
21. “Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the Language of Celebration,” Frontiers 4 (Fall 1979): 39–46. A revised version of this essay appears as “Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the Discourse of Desire” in Silence and Power, 156-68.
22. Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, 249-50.
23. Cheryl J. Plumb, Fancy’s Craft: Art and Identity in the Early Works of Djuna Barnes (Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania: Susquehanna University Press, 1986), 101.
24. Frann Michel, “All Women Are Not Women Alclass="underline" Ladies Almanack and Feminine Writing,” in Silence and Power, 182.
25. Karla Jay, “The Outsider Among the Expatriates: Djuna Barnes’s Satire on the Ladies of the Almanack,” in Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, ed. Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 204-16. This essay also appears in Silence and Power, 184-93.