Complex prose of a Sapphic classic

“None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.” – Djuna Barnes: Nightwood. 

I

POET and prose writer Wilma Stockenström recommended Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936) to me years ago. It doesn't take much guesswork to know that the author of The Baobab Expedition would consider Barnes's prose brilliant.

Compact. Loaded with implication. A novella you can read again and again. Complex, impenetrable prose.

She was born in New York, this controversial figure, also a journalist who interviewed James Joyce, but we don't know today how much was fictionalised. (Watch out for writers as journalists, I believe they embroider.)

Born 1892 and died 1982 aged 90. Also a poet, artist and playwright.

In the Thirties she travelled to Europe and North Africa.

II

The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water – as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations – the troubling structure of the born somnambule. – Djuna Barnes: Nightwood.

Nightwood is considered a lesbian cult novel and Barnes is obviously the predecessor to Jeanette Winterson. There are many myths about her life. Openly in relationships with women; yet in her later life denying this.

(Maybe rather bisexual.) There were rumours that she may have been raped as a young girl by a family friend. Her deep repudiation of her family comes to the fore vividly in the drama Antiphon. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the famous Dada artist, was a friend, with a clear lesbian connection in the letters between them. An erotic marriage with a book as love child. Displaced passion.

Carson McCullers and Anaïs Nin were great admirers of Barnes, who ignored them with contempt. Barnes was positive about the poet Marianne Moore, perhaps because of her own poetic aspirations?

In 1936, Nightwood appeared, with TS Eliot writing an accompanying introduction on poetic prose. (Eliot, the great poet, was also an enormously important publisher at Faber & Faber. He published Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1925, recounting how he laughed when reading the manuscript. Eliot “softened" the language of both novels due to the censorship of the time.) The movie adaptation of Loos's novel, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, is a film one can watch on repeat for the humour and craziness. Howard Hawks's 1953 film is iconic.

Set in Paris in the Twenties, Nightwood was written with the monetary support of Peggy Guggenheim. (In one of Woody Allen's lesser films, Midnight in Paris [2011], Barnes makes a small cameo appearance. In silence.) The gripping novel remains a landmark within feminist literature and deals with the end of a love affair between two women. A real relationship, but fictionalised in poetic language.

III

William Burroughs considered it one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century. The poet Dylan Thomas likewise raved about it, and it remains on the hit parade of gay novels.

It is not relevant whether Thelma Wood was the model for the novel or whether e e cummings was her neighbour. And whether she was stalked by baby lesbians in the area. And whether she might have drunk too much or whether her heart was finally broken.

Eliot refers to the text as a kind of Elizabethan tragedy.

The novel stands in the place of honour among other classical texts in my writing space: Karel Schoeman, Nabokov, Perec, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth. Next to Op 'n eiland.

Her reputation was immortalised in this monument of a book: Nightwood.

“I have been loved," she said, “by something strange, and it has forgotten me.” – Djuna Barnes: Nightwood.

In 1980, as a young traveller, I bought the book in San Francisco. Doodled notes next to important passages such as that one cannot escape one's nature. This story deals with a nine-year relationship with the artist Thelma Wood on the left bank in Paris. With Dr Matthew Mighty-grain-o-sand's monologues.

A classic in the Sapphian Modernism, reckons Sarah Churchwell in Defining Moments in Books.

The baroque flamboyance should be emphasised, Churchwell writes.

No one can describe it better.

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes was published by Faber & Faber and costs R237 at Loot.

♦ VWB ♦

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