{"id":28613,"date":"2012-04-02T08:00:03","date_gmt":"2012-04-02T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=28613"},"modified":"2012-04-02T10:56:34","modified_gmt":"2012-04-02T14:56:34","slug":"odd-corners-round-about-brooklyn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/04\/02\/odd-corners-round-about-brooklyn\/","title":{"rendered":"Odd Corners Round About Brooklyn"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Djuna Barnes.<\/p><\/div>\n

Djuna Barnes, best known as a cult feminist-ish lesbian experimental novelist, once described herself\u2014with unaccustomed hauteur\u2014as \u201cthe unknown legend of American literature.\u201d In her early career, she claimed to have worked for every English language publication in New York City, excepting only the Times<\/em>,\u00a0and by the time she left for Paris in 1921, had published some one hundred articles. As it turns out, Barnes is one of the great carnival barkers of the nonfiction world\u2014a kind of Tom Wolfe of her day.<\/p>\n

A new exhibition of Barnes\u2019s work at the Brooklyn Museum, running under the header \u201cNewspaper Fictions,\u201d concerns Barnes\u2019s New York years, beginning with the day when, fresh from the slopes of Storm King Mountain\u2014where she\u2019d shared a log cabin with her mother, grandmother, polygamist father, his mistress, and her odd-monikered brothers Saxon, Zendon, Shangar, and Thurn\u2014she allegedly marched into the offices of the Brooklyn Eagle<\/em>, dressed in a milkmaid\u2019s calico, and declared, \u201cI can draw and write and you\u2019d be foolish not to hire me.\u201d<\/p>\n

James Joyce, perhaps the greatest influence on Barnes\u2019s fiction, liked to advise, \u201cNever write about an unusual subject, make the common unusual.\u201d Barnes, for one, paid this dictum no mind: like Nathanael West and Flannery O\u2019Connor, she adored a misfit. Her writing\u2014full of immigrants, circus animals, freaks, socialists, hipsters, servants, and suffragettes\u2014revels in the atmosphere of the \u201cyellow nineties,\u201d a period characterized by Wildean decadence and art for art’s sake. One of her articles begins, \u201cThere is something in the smell of Summer that makes one think of the smell of the sea, and the smell of salt and of heavy wet winds and of fish and the tangled mats of wet seaweed that come to shore, beaching themselves like wigs, somehow forgotten by tragedians strolling tragically by the sands.\u201d Her journalism is dense with ornament of this kind, luring the reader into a baffling linguistic dream. Sometimes\u2014out of either fancy or carelessness\u2014it grows utterly surreal, as when she comments of Wilson Mizner that he \u201chas a laugh like a French pastry shop.\u201d <\/p>\n

Barnes, likely a victim of incest, suffered most of her life from alcoholism and depression. She seems to have found comfort in the grotesque, where bitterness could be translated to blazing wit. In a piece for Vanity Fair<\/em>, \u201cWhat Is Good Form in Dying: In Which Dozen Dainty Deaths Are Suggested for Daring Damsels,\u201d for instance, she extends advice to young ladies on how to optimize the aesthetics of suicide. She notes, with a Gothic irony to rival Edward Gorey\u2019s, that blondes look smartest when hanging \u201cperseveringly\u201d from a Venetian mirror, while the \u201cheavy-lidded vampire of the brunette order\u201d might more fashionably succumb to \u201cslow-green\u201d poison.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Djuna Barnes, sketch of a woman with hat, looking right, for "The Terrorists," New York Morning Telegraph <\/em>Sunday Magazine, September 30, 1917, ink on paper, 12 3\/4 x 8 1\/2 in. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Brooklyn exhibition, consisting of just forty-five objects, occupies a single wall. But it\u2019s possible to spend several hours there, nose to the crumbling yellow newsprint. A single copy of Barnes\u2019s collected nonfiction, New York<\/em>, lies chained to a bench nearby. Frustratingly, the volume is absent from the museum\u2019s gift shop and in fact appears to be out of print, as is Interviews<\/em>, Barnes\u2019s posthumous collection of deliciously unmediated t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eates<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If one does manage to find Barnes\u2019s work, it might suggest to the reader that New Journalism is not as new as it claims. Barnes\u2019s writing would hardly be welcome in the papers today without a sort of disclaimer, bearing more or less the same relation to our journalism as her stylized drawings do to photographs. Her impressionistic observations and anecdotes were often embellished or fabricated outright. For her very first assignment with the Eagle<\/em>, \u201cYou Can Tango\u2014a Little\u2014at Arcadia Dance Hall,\u201d she created a wealthy bachelor and perfume-counter girl from whole cloth: \u201cHe was bored. The tips of his immaculate tan shoes shone brightly as ever, the creases in his trousers were like the bow of the Imperator in their incisive sharpness, but his mind was as dull as a tarnished teapot.\u201d The tango, incidentally, appears to have fascinated Barnes: she followed it down to Coney Island for \u201cThe Tingling, Tangling Tango as \u2018Tis Tripped at Coney Isle\u201d (Brooklyn Eagle<\/em>, August 31, 1917).\u00a0This article\u2019s subtitle has a surrealistic grandeur that would cow an editor today: \u201cAn Evening with the Giddy Throng That Finds Its Fun in Gliding over the Shining Floor in a Hotel Close to the More or Less Sad Sea Waves\u2014The Late Arrivals Find a New Interest in Life After Being Bored with the Amusements of the Common People.\u201d<\/p>\n

The phrase newspaper fiction<\/em> was an invention of Barnes\u2019s own. She, like Janet Malcolm today, was a believer in what might be called journalism\u2019s observer effect, where the presence of someone watching, cataloging, and judging cannot but alter results. And so, finding that she cast a shadow on her observational path, Barnes duly recorded and printed it: an interview with Alfred Steiglitz sees her digressing with surprising candor on her own horror of life; she struggles to pay attention to Joyce and finds herself yelling at the playwright Donald Ogden Stewart for \u201crolling over and finding yourself famous,\u201d before cutting the interview short with the declaration that she might like to die. For \u201cJess Willard Says Girls Will Be Boxing for a Living Soon,\u201d she chats with a professional boxer\u2014who\u2019s no match for her cleverness. \u201cHis head,\u201d she writes, \u201chaving been overlooked by Sargent, is reproduced in every forest where cutters have been\u2014that gravely solemn thing, the stump of some huge tree staring in blunt Rodinesque mutilation from the ground.\u201d Willard wonders, \u201cI really don\u2019t understand why pretty girls like you reporters have to stick at a dungy job on a newspaper.\u201d Barnes often put words in a subject\u2019s mouth: here, credulity sticks at the \u201cdungy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her other great form was \u201cstunt\u201d journalism. In \u201cMy Adventures Being Rescued,\u201d Barnes attended a fireman\u2019s training, where she put herself in peril three times and was saved. A photograph in the exhibit shows her several stories up in a long black dress, dangling from the waist of a solemn young firemen, pump-clad feet neatly crossed at the ankle midair. Famously, she also subjected herself to artificial feeding for the New York World Magazine<\/em> in \u201cHow It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed,\u201d undergoing the procedure performed, often fatally, on hunger-striking suffragettes. In the photos, Barnes lies mummified in a white sheet, held down by three identically clad men in ties and shirtsleeves, while the doctor snakes a tube up her nose. A bit too cool for activism, Barnes focuses narrowly on subjective sensation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Djuna Barnes being forcibly fed, August 16, 1914. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.<\/p><\/div>\n

Barnes often illustrated these articles herself. She has an eye for gesture and costumery and an ability to infuse a sketch with insight, wit, and Brobdingnagian zest for the strange.\u00a0She likes types, cataloging people seen in hiring halls or \u201cTypes Found in Odd Corners Round About Brooklyn,\u201d such as a man sleeping against a pair of saloon doors, rumpled body listing gracefully to port.\u00a0(The drawing is gleefully captioned \u201cWhat Can He Have Sown That He Reaps Thus Fully\u2014Barley?\u201d) These lopping, loosey-goosey sketches are of a different order from Barnes\u2019s other, more intricate, Beardsleyan efforts\u2014often faces with over-size eyes and mazes of hair worked over in a Morse-like alphabet of dots.<\/p>\n

It was journalism that provided Barnes an entr\u00e9e into the literary world of expatriate Paris, where she would find a kind of fame. A photograph from this period ends the Brooklyn show, capturing Barnes in three-quarter profile, with an unaccustomed half-smile and slick black hair curled archly around the ears. Reportedly, it\u2019s inscribed on the verso, \u201cI can operate in the dark\u2014bodies are phosphorescent. I (See a condition of a poeta. Asteal light\u2014a condition of round and above a lovely spiritual message dearie.)\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a fitting finale, as, cloaked though Barnes is in her language, her chimerical phosphorescence is everywhere.<\/p>\n

Jenny Hendrix is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Djuna Barnes, best known as a cult feminist-ish lesbian experimental novelist, once described herself\u2014with unaccustomed hauteur\u2014as \u201cthe unknown legend of American literature.\u201d In her early career, she claimed to have worked for every English language publication in New York City, excepting only the Times,\u00a0and by the time she left for Paris in 1921, had published […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[6953,6952,6479,1888,6959,1132,6958,6956,6954,124,6960,270,6955,6957],"class_list":["post-28613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-brooklyn-eagle","tag-broooklyn-museum","tag-djuna-barnes","tag-flannery-oconnor","tag-how-it-feels-to-be-forcibly-fed","tag-interviews","tag-my-adventures-being-rescued","tag-nathanael-west","tag-new-journalism","tag-new-york","tag-newspaper-fictions","tag-paris","tag-storm-king-mountain","tag-wilson-mizner"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOdd Corners Round About Brooklyn by Jenny Hendrix<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 2, 2012 \u2013 Djuna Barnes, best known as a cult feminist-ish lesbian experimental novelist, once described herself\u2014with unaccustomed 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