The Tribune | Weekend | 25
Friday, July 17, 2020
BARNES posing beside the Patchin Place gate, was taken in 1962 by e e cummings’ wife, poet Marion Morehouse.
BARNES with Thelma Wood, whom she dedicated her novels “Ryder” and “Ladies Almanack” to
BARNES and Mina Loy – a Greenwich Village friend who featured in Barnes’ “Ladies Almanack” as Patience Scalpel, the sole heterosexual character in the book. “I wrote ‘The Antiphon’ with clenched teeth, and I noted that my handwriting was as savage as a dagger.” – Djuna Barnes, 1958 Barnes’ verse-play “The Antiphon” (1958) is set in 1939 England. Jeremy Hobbs has brought his family together in their ruined ancestral home Burley Hall and is intent on creating a confrontation about the family’s past. Barnes’
THE ECCENTRIC Dada artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven brother Thurn, in a letter, accused her of writing “revenge for something long dead and to be forgotten”. Barnes, however, scribbled in the margin of his letter “Justice” and “Not dead”. The play, curiously, premiered in 1961 in Stockholm in a Swedish translation by Karl Ragnar Gierow and United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. During her final lonely reclusive years in Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, Barnes returned to writing poetry – only a few of which were published in her lifetime. She wrote continuously during the day and saw no one. Her last book, “Creatures in an Alphabet” (1982), is a collection of short rhyming poems that suggests a format for a children’s book but whose content makes it an unlikely and unsuitable subject for children. “Looking down the barrel of your eye, I see the body of a bloody Cinderella looking back.” – Djuna Barnes Barnes in her last years was intensely suspicious of anyone she did not know well. She refused to see Anais Nin – the diarist and a fan of her work – who wanted Barnes to participate in a journal on women’s writing. She would cross the street to avoid her. e e cummings, the American poet and playwright who lived across the street, would shout out of his window, “Are you still alive, Djuna?” Bertha Harris, the feminist author of “Lover” (1976) put roses in her mailbox but never
managed to see her. And Carson McCullers, the American feminist who wrote “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter”, (1940) camped on her doorstep, but Barnes only shouted down, “Whoever is ringing this bell, please go the hell away.” “I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished.” – Djuna Barnes, Nightwood Barnes continued to work and write poetry in her final years despite severe health problems and arthritis so severe that she found it difficult even to sit at her typewriter and turn her desk lamp on. Many of these poems were never finished. “The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.” – Djuna Barnes, Nightwood She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961, and was awarded a senior fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1981. She died at her home in Greenwich Village on June 18, 1982, six days after her 90th birthday. • Sir Christopher Ondaatje is the author of The Last Colonial. He acknowledges that he has quoted liberally from Wikipedia; Lives of the Novelists (2011) by John Sutherland; and Vivid and Repulsive as the Truth: The Early Works of Djuna Barnes (2016), edited by Katharine Maller.
