{"id":98101,"date":"2016-05-12T16:19:43","date_gmt":"2016-05-12T20:19:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=98101"},"modified":"2016-05-12T16:51:15","modified_gmt":"2016-05-12T20:51:15","slug":"greenwich-village-1971","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/05\/12\/greenwich-village-1971\/","title":{"rendered":"Greenwich Village, 1971"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Djuna Barnes.<\/p><\/div>\n

Although she died in 1982, at the age of ninety, Djuna Barnes seems to have recorded her voice on only a few occasions. The tape below was made in her Patchin Place<\/a> home in 1971. Barnes is best known for Nightwood<\/em>, her modernist classic,\u00a0but she had a long and thriving career as a journalist and in the avant-garde literary scene. Her body of work, including The Book of Repulsive Women<\/em>, Ryder<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Ladies Almanack<\/em>, spans aestheticism, Dada, and high modernism. Her books are deep, often challenging, and crucial.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here, she reads from her final play, 1958\u2019s The Antiphon.<\/em>\u00a0Barnes\u00a0told her publisher<\/a>, Robert Giroux, that she considered it her most important work.\u00a0The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0praised the play as one rich in\u00a0\u201cthe pleasure of language. Not spoken language; Miss Barnes has no ear for the stage, but the intricate, rich, almost viciously brilliant discourse, modeled more or less on the murkier post-Elizabethans.\u201d The play concerns the war of wills within a family, primarily between a middle-aged woman and her mother: in the course of the action, the entire clan faces a sort of stylized trial on a stage decorated with \u201cflags, gonfalons, bonnets, ribbons, and all manner of stage costumes \u2026 A long table with a single settle facing front, at either end of which is set the half of a gryphon, once a car in a roundabout.\u201d In the end, mother and daughter, tried and found wanting, effectively kill each other (by means of a large brass bell, at that).\u00a0<\/p>\n

The audio here is not great; even when you really crank it, Barnes\u2019s voice fades in and out, and there\u2019s a good deal of setting up. She reads briefly from\u00a0The Antiphon,<\/em>\u00a0however, and it\u2019s worth your time to hear her interpretation\u2014the mix of strength and frailty, querulousness and imperiousness. And, of course, to hear her voice, that long-extinct citizen-of-the-world inflection, an emissary from another world.\u00a0<\/p>\n