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Library
of Texts, Artwork, and Contextual Information
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Barnes's
August 1956 "Cautionary Note" to The Antiphon
As
a misreading of The Antiphon is not impossible, it might
be well to keep in mind that Jack is breezy; not raffish; that Augusta
is by turns timid and imperious; that Miranda, although indentured
to ordeal, can rise to impassioned fury--but, never between the
two women is there any sluttish whining. Their familiarity is their
estrangement. They do not scold or bicker. Their duel is in hiatus,
and should be waged with style
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Barnes's
Comments on Censorship in her Foreward to Ryder, Paris, 8
August 1927.
This
book, owing to censorship, which has a vogue in America as indiscriminate
as all such enforcements of law must be, has been expurgated. Where
such measures have been though necessary, asterisks have been employed,
thus making it matter for no speculation where sense, continuity,
and beauty have been damaged.
That the public may, in our time, see at least a part of
the face of creation (which it is not allowed to view as a whole)
it has been thought the better part of valour, by both author and
publisher, to make this departure, showing plainly where the war,
so blindly waged on the writted word, has left its mark.
Hithertofore the public has been offered literature
only after it was no longer literature. Or so murdered and so discreetly
bound in linens that those regarding it have seldom, if ever, been
aware, or discovered, that that which they took for an original
was indeed a reconstruction.
In the case of Ryder they are permitted to see the
havoc of this nicety, and what its effects are on the work of imagination.
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| Barnes's
rendering of her fictional counterpart Julie Ryder in her semiautobiographical
novel Ryder (1928).
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A
drawing by Barnes from Ryder. Many of Ryder's illustrations
originally were censored by Barnes's editors and publishers due to
their violent and sexual content. The 1990 edition of Ryder
restores the novel to its original form by including all of Barnes's
drawings. See Barnes's Forward to Ryder to read her reaction
to this censorship. |
| Another
sketch from Ryder. Ryder is a mock family chronicle
that loosely follows Barnes's own family life, including implications
of psychosexual abuse by her father Henry Budington "Wald"
Barnes and her grandmother Zadel Barnes as well as her father's marital
infidelities. |
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The
Book of Repulsive Women
(1915) is a collection of eight poems and five drawings by Barnes.
Like many of her other books, it mainly concerns women's sexuality.
It explores this topic through portraitures of "repulsive"
women, including a prostitute, a cabaret dancer, and a suicidal woman. |
| Ladies
Almanack
(1928) is Barnes's satire of Victorian ladies' handbooks and eighteenth
century medical manuals. This text's subversiveness lies within its
open representation of a lesbian community through its explicit drawings
and text. |
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Barnes
drew this "baby vamp" for a feature entitled "Vampire
Women: Eight Pen Portraits, from Life" in a 1915 volume of Vanity
Fair. In the article, she was named one of the eight "greatest
vampire specialists in America." The "hokku" (haiku)
underneath the sketch was written by occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)
under the pseudonym Kwaw Li Ya. |
| Barnes's
drawing of James Joyce that she included with her April 1922 interview
with Joyce (Interviews 291). |
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Miscellaneous
Quotations
"Suffering
for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love
of grandmother up and on."
--Djuna
Barnes to Emily Holmes Coleman, February 2, 1934
"It
is a dreadful fact about parenthood that after maturity the child
does not need the parent, but the parent continues to need the child--I
ought to live with him, but I never will."
--Emily
Holmes Coleman to Djuna Barnes, August 27, 1936
"I
must have been very young at twenty-nine when I met [Thelma Wood]!
Much younger than her nineteen, for her years were aged in sensuality
and its consequent need of craft--I was a (truly) virgin yokel looking
for lost sheep, and mistook her wolf's blood."
--Djuna
Barnes in a 1937 letter to Emily Holmes Coleman (found in Phillip
Herring's Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes. New York:
Viking, 1995. 156.)
"There
is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole."
--Djuna
Barnes
"I
have to tell you of the great, deep beauty of your Nightwood
. . . . A woman rarely writes as a woman, as she feels, but you
have."
--Anais
Nin to Djuna Barnes
"Of
course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?"
--Djuna
Barnes in a 1960s letter to Natalie Barney (found in Andrea Weiss's
Paris Was a Woman. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.,
1995. 173.)
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