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DJUNA BARNES AND T. S. ELIOT: THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF NIGHTWOOD1
The history of Nightwood is an embattled one. Djuna Barnes began the novel emerging from a nine-year relationship with another American expatriate in Paris, the silverpoint artist Thelma Wood, during one of the most peripatetic periods of her life. After a transatlantic voyage back to America in September 1933, Barnes had, by 1935, accrued six rejections from potential publishers; then her manuscript was rejected a third time by T.R. Smith, the editor at Liveright who had previously published A Book (1923), Ryder (1928), and A Night Among The Horses (1929). Barnes' creative process proved equally arduous, spanning six years and at least three versions, the latter of which was finally accepted by T. S. Eliot at the London house of Faber and Faber (1936) and was republished in America by Harcourt Brace with the addition of Eliot's introduction (1937).
Controversy did not cease with publication. Nightwood's initial critical reception was divided, interestingly, in response to the novel's morality.2 During the decades following publication, Barnes had tremendous difficulty producing new work and did not publish again until 1958. During this time, though Nightwood was being translated into several foreign languages (Swedish and French; German, Dutch, and Danish to follow), the novel languished for critical attention, and Barnes proclaimed herself "the most famous unknown of the century!"3 Finally in the 1960s attempts were made, most notably by Joseph Frank and Kenneth Burke, to view Nightwood in light of the modernist movement.4 A decade later, the first book-length studies of Barnes' oeuvre appeared, by James B. Scott and by Louis Kannenstein, in 1976 and 1977 respectively.5 They were accompanied by a nascent wave of reinterpretation.6
On June 19, 1982, a week after her ninetieth birthday, Djuna Barnes died in the one-room Patchin Place apartment in Greenwich Village she had occupied increasingly hermetically for over forty years. A year later, the first biography of Barnes appeared,7 followed by a wave of primarily feminist revision both of Nightwoods8 and of Barnes' relationship to other women expatriates who had lived and worked in Paris during the 1920s (Benstock, 1986).
The feminist revisions of Barnes have been undeniably fruitful but, as will be demonstrated below, too often compromised by...