Djuna Barnes — Nightwood with Margaret Vandenburg

Dark and disturbing, yet strangely redemptive, Djuna Barnes’s 1936 modernist masterpiece Nightwood left even its greatest champion, T.S. Eliot, a bit bewildered. Guest Margaret Vandenburg, an expert in modernism, post-modernism and gender studies, joins us to illuminate Barnes’s tumultuous life and help us decipher her "ultimate breakup novel,” a work that casts its spell by turning the world upside down in subversive defiance of fascism.

Mentioned in this episode:

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

Craze by Margaret Vandenburg

An American in Paris by Margaret Vandenburg

Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes by Jon Macy

The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes by Phillip Herring

New York by Djuna Barnes (collected journalism)

The Book of Repulsive Women and Other Poems by Djuna Barnes

Ladies Almanac by Djuna Barnes

“The Antiphon” by Djuna Barnes

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 266 on Radclyffe Hall

Zadel Barnes

Barnes’s 1922

Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers, join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click “Become a Patron” to find out more. 

KIM: ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host Amy Helmes.

AMY: The author we'll be discussing today, Djuna Barnes, has always been one of those authors I felt like I should read, and yet I never had until now. She seemed to me Kim, like this insurmountable hurdle -- strange and intimidating.

KIM: I felt exactly the same way about reading her. And Barnes seems to have predicted all that because at the age of 75, she called herself "the most famous unknown of the century."

AMY: But interestingly, she was very known and even revered by some of the biggest literary names of her time. Dylan Thomas called her most famous work, Nightwood, "one of the three major prose works by a woman."

KIM: Only three. Interesting. 

AMY: I'm so glad we have three!

KIM: Thank goodness. Barnes was also great pals with James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. And Eliot adored her novel so much he ushered it through the publication process for Faber and Faber and wrote the introduction to it.

AMY: But let's talk about that intro for a second. Because in it, Eliot basically admits that he had to read Nightwood a few times to even make any sense of it. Mayday! Mayday! If T.S. Eliot was stumped by this book, how am I supposed to tackle it? 

KIM: I understand your trepidation, Amy. Yet Eliot goes on to say of the book: "A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give." And listeners, we know you are no ordinary novel readers. You are up to the task!

AMY: Yeah, exactly. And Eliot suggests in that intro that you may need to read this book a few times in succession to really let it sink in. And that's exactly what I did. I read it once, and then I also listened to an audio book version of it, and that really helped a lot for sure. So, too, is having an understanding of Barnes's life. Her biographer Philip Herring, said "Before I could understand the novel, I had to understand Djuna Barnes." 

KIM: Yes, absolutely. Barnes lived a darkly fascinating life, which seeps into her often morbid and disquieting modernist work. So let's explore the ragged, shadowy edges of the night with Djuna Barnes. We've got a guest today who can help light the way. She's the author of a new novel that draws some of its inspiration from Barnes's life and work. So let's read the stacks and get started.

[intro music plays]

AMY: Our guest today, Margaret Vandenberg, spent her academic career as a senior lecturer at Barnard College specializing in modernism, postmodernism, and gender studies. She is a novelist, playwright and essayist whose books include Craze, a Jazz-Age portrait of queer New York that was shortlisted for the 2024 Sarton Award, as well as the prequel to that book, An American in Paris. That's a fictional romp through the sapphic salons of Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney. And listeners, I highly recommend these novels. You will learn, in a really engaging way I think, about so many important historical figures in art and literature of this time period, including some lost ladies of lit.

KIM: Yes, and I love this: Margaret wrote the libretto for an opera called Ada. That's about Lord Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, who invented the first computer language. That is so, so cool. Margaret's plays include “Roe Versus Wade 2.0.” and “Belly of the Beast,” a finalist for the Drama League Award for Outstanding Digital Theater. Margaret, welcome to the show. We are thrilled to have you on.

MARGARET: Thank you so much, Amy and Kim. I'm delighted and honored to be here. And hello, everybody!

AMY: And I wanna say first off, that I really enjoyed reading your newest novel, Craze, and I think it was a really good starting point for our investigation into Djuna Barnes, which as I said in the intro, I was so intimidated by. In your book, you have your characters immersed in this really exhilarating point in time where emergent modernist writers and artists were pushing all sorts of boundaries, both in art and in their personal lives. And we'll talk a little bit later about some of the Djuna Barnes influences in your book. But first I want to hear about your own initial encounter with her work. What do you remember about first reading her and when did you discover her?

MARGARET: So I discovered Barnes and all the people in the Barnes’s world when I was writing my dissertation at Columbia. It's called, “The Androgyny Crisis in Modernism,” a very dramatic title. And it covers Barnes, Stein, Woolf, Hemingway, Joyce, which sounds like strange bedfellows perhaps, but they're all engaged with androgyny, and there's a kind of gender war in modernism overall, which of course they're all modernists. And that's in part the difficulty, right? It's not just Barnes, it's all modernists. They have a certain vocabulary, and a lot of the vocabulary has to do with this gender war. And I did also encounter her archive at the University of Maryland, because I was trying to excavate some of the things, as you guys know, that were deleted or excised out of Nightwood. So it was a kind of deeper dive into Barnes than anyone else. And partly, too, because she has a very particular characterization of androgyny and gender fluidity, I think you even used the word “morbid.” But at the same time, I think there's something really radically redemptive about it. And that's the thing that I think we're going to try to get at, to sort of recast who she is and how she writes, because the biography is so weird, right? 

AMY: Yes. 

MARGARET: It starts to dictate the way that we read her, and it might even be misleading.

AMY: Mm. Okay.

KIM: Interesting. Yeah. All right, so you mentioned darkness, and that does pervade Nightwood. It's essentially a breakup novel, a really beautiful one. Um, it's about Barnes' fictionalized retelling of a really painful breakup she had with her long time lover, Thelma Wood. Barnes populates her novel with figures who are on the fringe. They're debauched, degenerate and despairing. But to fully understand this novel or any of Barnes's writing, maybe, I think understanding the details of her extremely troubled childhood might help us. So Margaret, do you wanna fill our listeners in on some of what she endured in her youth? It's a pretty wild, disturbing tale.

MARGARET: Yeah, I mean, in some ways she has the wildest biography, one of the wildest, certainly in, human history. 

AMY: Netflix could go to town for about 10 seasons, I think.

MARGARET: Good idea. 

KIM: Yeah. 

MARGARET: There's sort of two sides to it. There's something terrible about the childhood, but there might be also something valuable. So it starts out on a pretty bad foot. She grows up in the Hudson Valley, and she has this really weird grandmother and this really weird father. So her family was not just a single family. It was weird, multi-generational, bigamous. They blended the legitimate and then sometimes children in this household, they had weird names like Fern, Zenden, Shankar, Saxon, Buan. Everything about them was weird. They were dominated, in some ways, by this grandmother, whose name was Zadel. So Zadel is a 19th century Bohemian journalist, poet, spiritualist, political radical, um feminist, moral crusader, all of these things. Philanthropist, occultist. And she traveled abroad. She had friends including John Greenleaf Whittier, Jack London, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. So really formidable friends and colleagues. And then she sort of foregrounds her son, who she thinks is a genius, and she funds this household and he just sits around basically doing nothing except being a non-genius. And his beliefs are kind of mixed between Henry David Thoreau and Brigham Young. In the wings of all of this is this kind of utopian society, even though it's anything but. And in the context of this philosophy and this sort of weird household, poor Djuna is ultimately either raped by her father or farmed out to a neighbor to be relieved of her virginity at the age of 16, and then possibly also had an incestuous relationship with her grandmother, although we will talk about that when we talk about Nightwood. Finally, they marry her off, and it's a ridiculous marriage. It lasts for two months, to a 52-year-old, on her 18th birthday. And then she escapes, finally, finally, when one of her brothers funds her education. First at the Pratt Institute for Art in Brooklyn. And then she ends up for a while at the Art Students League in New York, and then her life in New York begins after this, you know, horrendous childhood.

AMY: I mean borderline culty. As you said, there were positive things, 'cause they were extremely intellectual, all of them. She's soaking up all of that from her grandmother, who is kind of a badass. She's sort of a lost lady of lit herself, right? I mean, she was a writer. There was so much potential there, but then this like weird controlling, obsession with sex and free love.

KIM: Nobody could sleep alone, right? Everybody had to share a bed at the house.

AMY: It was twisted. You could see how it would've messed her up in a lot of ways, but luckily she did get out of it.

MARGARET: Right. And as you say, the social, cultural life. They have musical evenings. They have readings from the classics. They have apparently very good homeschooling given how educated she is. I'm glad that you underscored that other side of it. 

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. And so speaking of this grandmother, you know, she's this brilliant, charismatic woman, and Djuna is betrayed and hurt by her. And that's a cycle that we're gonna see repeat for her once she is living in the Left Bank in Paris in the 1920s. But before we get to that, let's pivot to her time in New York City when she's a young woman. This is the 19-teens, basically, that decade. Barnes has managed to escape her family's destructive hold. Can you tell us a little bit about her earliest professional endeavors, which again are kind of brilliant, but also really weird.

MARGARET: Yeah, there's so much ground to cover that it's terrible to condense these things so much, 

AMY: Somebody could do a full podcast series just on her, because there's just too much to tackle. But go ahead.

MARGARET: Right. And there's a bridge from this terrible Bohemian childhood to Greenwich Village in so far as that we all know that Greenwich Village was this Bohemian mecca at the time. And it's a free love mecca. So, you know, it is the perfect sort of pivot for her. She makes her living and starts to, in fact, support her family in journalism, and she's incredibly successful right out of the gate. She starts at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She's an illustrator and a reporter and a cartoonist. At The New York Press, she wrote theatrical interviews under the direction of Carl Van Vechten and he called her his “favorite genius.” I won't go through all the different places that she worked, but she had a lot of different publications and different, journalistic venues. Best known for her so-called stunt stories. There's a collection of them called New York Djuna Barnes, Sun and Moon Press. They're just fantastic. One very famous one is called “My Adventures Being Rescued,” where she went to a basic training school for firemen in downtown New York, and she was rescued in a sling, she shimmied down a hundred-foot rope, she solo dissented in a slippery ladder and was photographed landing in a net. I mean, just fearless and really hands-on journalism. And then the most famous, which I'm sure you know, is “How it Feels to Be Forcibly Fed.” She was really moved by even the deaths and the suffering of some of the suffragettes, especially in England. So she was placed on the operating table. You know, four men were there. One doctor. Three of them pinned her down. She sees the rubber hose they inserted down her throat. I wanted to read something that she wrote because it's relevant to everything that we're gonna talk about in her fiction. This happens to be about force feeding, but the operative term in this is violation. There are all these violations, right? We already talked about it in her childhood. So I think there's a kind of triple entendre in this quote from how it feels to be forcibly fed. She writes, "There it is," she says, "the outraged will. If I, play acting, felt my being burned with revolt at this brutal usurpation of my own functions, how they, who actually suffered the ordeal in its acutest horror, must have flamed at the violation of the sanctuary of their spirits." So that was a phase of her work and it's gonna be a foreshadowing of things to come. And then McCall’s sent her to Paris. She interviews Joyce, becomes very close to him. Allegedly, she's the only one that was allowed to call him Jim. And that was the sort of segue to her getting eventually to Paris after New York. And she hobnobbed… I think you mentioned in our correspondence the sort of name dropping aspect to her life. Um, Edmund Wilson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O'Neil, Peggy Guggenheim, Carl Van Vechten, Mabel Dodge, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-loringhoven, Berenice Abbott. I mean, it was just insane.

KIM: So she moves to Paris in 1921 and she settles among all these creatives on the Left Bank.

AMY: Tell us a little more though about Peggy Guggenheim, because I feel like she factors in really heavily going forward in Djuna's life. 

MARGARET: Yeah, so, when we talk about the composition of Nightwood, Peggy was her patron and she sort of had a permanent Guggenheim fellowship, in effect. Djuna becomes part of this avant garde salon, you know, circuit, and Peggy's hanging out in the same circles, along with Janet Flanner, Myna Loy, Solita Solano, Radcliffe Hall, Dolly Wilde, Una Trubridge, Elisabeth de Gramont. Going to the salons of Natalie Barney, uh, especially. Gertrude Stein has her own salon, but it's less about women. Most of those figures, I should say, end up being characters in The Women's Almanac. And this is what she writes early on in Paris. And she's featuring many of these saloneurs, right? Many of these Natalie Barney figures. Peggy's not part of that. She's not quite as active in this kind of sexual experimentation that goes along with the experimentation in avant-garde art, but she's gonna become important later because she facilitates Djuna's career. These authors were basically not published by traditional presses. They really were publishing themselves in many cases. And that's why Peggy's such an important figure in her life.

AMY: Peggy collects all the artwork, but in a sense it's like Djuna was one of her pieces of art. Her prized artist in a way, you know? Also, can you imagine these literary salons? Amazing.

MARGARET: Yeah, it was the ultimate sapphic moment. It was the ultimate lesbian mecca moment.

AMY: The heyday. 

MARGARET: Unmatched in history. Yeah. Right. 

AMY: Okay, so let's turn our focus to Nightwood now. While there isn't much of a plot to speak of in this book, which was published in 1936, it's really the demise of Djuna's eight year relationship with Thelma Wood. That is sort of the main event that she is writing about. So Djuna was absolutely broken in the wake of their split, and it seems like writing Nightwood, which is a roman-a-clef based on real people in her circles, was her way of climbing back out of that emotional abyss, as people still do today when they break up with a lover, you know?

MARGARET: There are times when the biography overshadows the meaning, and that's especially true in Nightwood. And as you mentioned, this is the ultimate breakup novel. She's lost the love of her life, Thelma Wood. Her name is Robin Vote, the main character. And, um, the title Nightwood then has "night" which has a particular meaning, which we'll talk about. And then Thelma “Wood.” Night/Wood. Another character is Guido Bruno, based on a New York publisher. He published her first book, The Book of Repulsive Women. He had a disguised, in air quotes, Jewish background. In other words, he was ashamed of it. He was the son of a rabbi, changed his name to Guido Bruno, and tried to, in some ways, to pass, as do some of the characters in Nightwood, for reasons that we'll obviously discuss. Felix, um, Paul Greve, was a lover of someone we mentioned earlier, Elsa von Freytag Lorenhoven. He was a kind of gay gadfly, um, who then realized, when he slept with Elsa, that in fact he decided he was straight. He became an important Canadian novelist. But he used to sign the hotel registers, Baron Volkbein, and that becomes one of the names of the Jewish characters in the first chapter of Nightwood. And that's something I'd like to use as an example of the way in which the biography overshadows the meaning because, “volk” of course, is an important Nazi term and it has to do with race and ethnicity to promote Nazi ideology. It's something that's coming up in, you know, basically an American culture at this time. So, to sort of overemphasize the background is to miss the importance that it's not about the hotel register, it's about "Volkbein" and its relationship to Nazism, which we'll discuss at length. The same is true of, we might discuss him more later 'cause I think he wanted to talk about Matthew O'Connor, and he's based, as you know, on Dan Mahoney. But it's not important, even if we talk about Dan later, it's not important so much that he is based on Dan Mahoney. It's important what he says and how Barnes translates what he says into the kind of prophecy of the night and what that means in terms of its relationship to the rise of fascism, et cetera. And then Barnes herself is, in some ways the Nora character, and the person that she lost Thelma to, Henrietta Metcalf, is the Jenny Petherbridge character. But once again, that's less important than what they represent.

AMY: So it's not a roman-a-clef in the sense of “I am spilling the dirt on all these real people.”

MARGARET: Yeah. It's not like Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

AMY: Right.

KIM: Yeah.

MARGARET: That's literally what you just said. I'm gonna tell you about all these people. Or A Movable Feast, Hemingway.

AMY: Right.

MARGARET: Many of the great writers do this. You're taking your personal experience, obviously, but you're really translating it into something transcendent.

AMY: Okay.

KIM: I'm so excited to get deeper into all of this, but let's back up just a little bit and talk about when Barnes was writing the novel. So she wrote Nightwood while she was staying at Hayford Hall. So picture this country house in Devon, England. It's being rented by Peggy Guggenheim, and a few of their other Bohemian friends were staying there. Margaret, do you know a bit about the escapades that went on? 

MARGARET: There's not a lot of information because I think it was pretty simple. It was nicknamed Hangover Hall. 

KIM: That's a clue.

MARGARET: That's pretty much what was going on. You know that Nightwood is dedicated to Peggy Guggenheim and John Ferrar Holmes. Holmes was Peggy's lover for a while. He was a World War I hero and a literary critic. Um, there were other people there in and out. And really, they sort of partied and they played kind of mean games. You know, there was a lot of sort of bad blood happening. It was not a great vibe.

AMY: Again, we're saving this for the Netflix series.

KIM: It's like a soap opera. “Hangover Hall.” 

MARGARET: Djuna would write all morning and then she'd emerge, you know, in her cape for lunch and they would play this game “Truth” at night as they were, you know, tipping the bottle. Each would write a truth about one of the other ones, some terrible truth probably. And then they would sort of put them in a bowl and mix them up so that they didn't know who wrote what, and then they would read them and get really mad at each other. 

KIM: So immature. 

MARGARET: It was, really, you know … it was Hangover Hall. And, the importance I think of Hayford Hall is that she had to have this place to write, 'cause this is her masterpiece. Peggy provides the place, and Djuna has all this free time to do what she's doing. This is the way that she could get into print is to be at Hayford Hall, just as the Woolfs had Hogarth Press. The Steins had the Plain Edition. Nightwood was published because of Eliot at Faber and Faber. These are these networks. Ulysses was published by Shakespeare and Company, as you know, because Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monier, sort of ironically, in a way, these two lesbians decided to publish Ulysses because nobody else would. So this was kind of the engendering birth canal of Nightwood is once again, one of these kinds of Bohemian sites.

KIM: Oh, I love birth canal. I love that. Okay, oh, I'm so excited for this part. Margaret, will you read a passage from Nightwood to illustrate Barnes' writing style? 

MARGARET: I would love to. Probably many people, when they end up reading the book, will have the same page number. So this is 1 36 and 1 37. And um, as usual, the doctor is talking. He says “Very well, what is this love we have for the invert?” Um, I should pause. I know you recently did a session on The Well of Loneliness, and we know that one of the terms for homosexuality at this time is invert 

AMY: Right. 

MARGARET: “Very well—what is this love we have for the invert, boy or girl? It was they who were spoken of in every romance that we ever read. The girl lost, what is she but the Prince found? The Prince on the white horse that we have always been seeking. And the pretty lad who is a girl, what but the prince-princess in point lace—neither one and half the other, the painting on the fan! We love them for that reason. We were impaled in our childhood upon them as they rode through our primers, the sweetest lie of all, now come to be in boy or girl, for in the girl it is the prince, and in the boy it is the girl that makes a prince a prince—and not a man. They go far back in our lost distance where what we never had stands waiting; it was inevitable that we should come upon them, for our miscalculated longing has created them. They are our answer to what our grandmothers were told love was, and what it never came to be; they, the living lie of our centuries. 

AMY: So it's going back to the androgyny that you talked about, which is such an important theme. Um. But also in terms of the writing style, Margaret, you're, you're so much more elevated academically and everything, I'm sure you didn't have this problem as much, but Kim, did you find yourself having to go back and be like, “Okay, let me read that sentence again. Let me read it again.”

KIM: Completely, yeah. To come to understand it. Like completely. And I still, you know, feel like I'm gonna need to read it multiple times, like you said, to fully get it. But yeah, there's so much in every sentence, and trying to get the exact meeting, which I don't think I was always successful at, but that's okay.

AMY: Some of it you have to let wash over you. Some of it's just imagery. That line about, I think the doctor says it, um, to Nora about her and Robin, they're broken up at this point and he says, you guys are gonna be like two stags whose horns are locked for eternity. And you're never gonna be able to untangle. That image of like, the two stags with their horns locked.

KIM: Yeah, the poetic beauty, even if you don't always understand exactly the meaning. The beauty and the imagery of it are so wonderful that you get that and then you have to sort of process the rest. 

AMY: Yeah. 

MARGARET: I think some of what you're describing is that these are archaic images. And this is not surprising in a way because modernism is a kind of renaissance, right? They're reaching all the way back to the classics. So it's certainly a modernist thing. And then the imagery is the same thing. You know, you have to kind of reconstruct a kind of modernist renaissance mode of symbolism. But also I think each of these modernists have a different stamp. In her case, what she does is more anthropological than any of the other ones. She gets into a deep history. We were gonna talk a little about Proust. Maybe the difference between her and somebody like Proust is that she actually gets into a deep history that's almost on a species level. She uses the word “race” in the book, and it's loaded in terms of Nazis, but it's also the human race. And so that's why I think it's difficult. I mean, it's difficult 'cause it's modernist; they're all difficult. But it's also difficult because the depth is in some ways unprecedented. And we're not used to reading books like that.

AMY: Yeah, you have two sentences where you're like, “Okay, I could spend 15 minutes on these two sentences because there's just so much packed into it.” So you have an entire book that's like that. But while I was reading it, I kept thinking of Proust and I don't know why. I think just the carriage rides and the Bois de Bologne, you know. There was so much that was reminiscent, I guess.

KIM: Oh yeah, the importance of night and beds. Like, a bed. If you think of In Search of Lost Time. 

AMY: So I'm not crazy that I had that? 

KIM: Not, to me.

MARGARET: That's kind of Paris stuff, isn't it? 

KIM: Yeah, that's true.

MARGARET: So he writes “remembrance past” and he takes the bite of the madeleine and all these memories come rushing back. And when I said anthropological, they're doing the same thing, 'cause all these memories are coming rushing back. But it's the depth of her memory. So it's the memory of things that we have lost access to, which is what that passage that I read was about. Remembering who we were before gender was invented. Because gender is a construct. It's not a real thing. So that's the difference between her and Proust. Then the memory is deeper, and in the first chapter of Nightwood, she kind of says, in some ways, what's at stake with that. This is on page 15. Here's that memory language again. She says, "we may all be nature's noblemen." That takes us all the way back. Not these fake noblemen, not these, you know, aristocratic and Aryan noblemen, but rather nature's noblemen  “that are forgotten in spite of all man remembers unless he remembers himself." So it's the memory of this deeper self. That memory is legend, not history. History becomes the thing that, you know, Nazi and fascist regimes revise, and the thing that they pretend that they're telling, and they abduct history. Legend is the deeper thing. It's an archetypal, Jungian thing. And when I say Jungian, it's at odds with Freud because as you know, Jung and Freud had a falling out. And Matthew, this doctor that talks nonstop, it's a parody of the talking cure. It's a parody of Freud and part of that parody, I'll just give you a very concrete example, is Matthew, who is transvestite or transgender, we'd have to talk about that if we had time. And it's very tricky in the novel. Very interesting, the distinction between the two. And he has womb envy as it were, right? Either because he is queeny and campy or because he's trans. And that would be something we would argue out. But womb envy is clearly a parody of penis envy, among other things.

AMY: Oh. Wow.

KIM: Okay, if we're gonna say too much, you know, listen to this after you read the book, I would say, listeners, listen to this and then read the book, 'cause I feel like I'm already ready to go back with some deeper knowledge and being able to read this with more, um, insight is very helpful. 

MARGARET: Right. And that's the thing about all modernism, but, you know, Nightwood in particular. If we were to have a reading group, if we were to really spend time on it, everything would be comprehensible. It's not like you're gonna end up saying, “What the heck?” It's just that you have to build up the vocabulary.

KIM: Yeah, definitely. Like Ulysses. Yeah. 

AMY: It is similar. I found myself even, I don't remember how many sections it's broken up to, after I finished each one, I would have to just go get a summary of like, “Okay, what did I just read? Let me make sure I understood even the basic action of the plot.” Like I wanted to make sure I had it all straight in my head. So yeah, if you're reading this, listeners, you're gonna have to do a little work. 

KIM: So let's talk more about Dr. Matthew O'Connor. He's actually a scene-stealer in this novel. He's not a legal doctor, but he does perform illicit abortions and his monologues tend to take over the text at times. But they're always compelling and he is such a tragic figure. Can you explain more, Margaret, about the role that he serves in this novel, because it's very important.

MARGARET: Yeah, so again, he's based on this, you know, real-life character who was a kind of fixture in the Paris cafe scene. And he had a very interesting kind of self-creation. He would tell lies about himself. Some of those lies made their way into Nightwood. And Barnes and others really just love listening to him talk. So that's the sort of backstory of it. But Matthew himself, what he becomes in Nightwood, and it's all through his mouth in many ways until the last chapter. And in the last chapter, Matthew falls away, you noticed. He disappears. Incidentally, Eliot wanted to delete the last chapter. And he did delete some things as we mentioned earlier, but Barnes would not let him get rid of the final chapter. And when he wanted to, she said, "poor Eliot, he left his organ in the church." Because he misread basically this incredibly important meaning of the final chapter, which is obscure in some ways because Matthew's not there to tell us what it means. He keeps telling us, to the extent that he does, what things mean. It's still difficult, because the last chapter, you're just like, “What is going on?” Because he's not there to tell us about it. 

AMY: Yes. Your comparing him to Freud and a psychoanalyst is perfect, and I never really thought of that, but he is like part-prophet, part-psychoanalyst, part-priest, you know, there's a lot of religion that he pulls into things. Um, part like the fun gay guy in the room that's kind of making you laugh and saying outrageous things. Um, yeah, he was my favorite character. I think most people probably feel that way when they read the book.

MARGARET: I love that you said priest because they called D.H. Lawrence “the priest of love,” and they took sexuality very seriously. I mean, it was like a religion to Lawrence. I think that's a very apt thing to say, because it is sexuality and inversion, as it was called, that is the saving grace that pushes back against this fascistic power structure. We don't have time to sort of do justice to it, but the fascistic power structure, of course, is very hierarchical, and hierarchy depends on binary oppositions because one thing is considered superior to the other. Men, women. Light, dark. I mean, even Nightwood is a resistance to the kind of valorization of light and enlightenment. And so he represents, among other characters in the book, this collapse of the binary oppositions that is especially made possible through homosexuality, through inversion. And it's important to use the term, even though it might have a negative connotation, because one of the strategies used in the novel is from the carnival-esque like Rabelais, and it's been theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin, and in short it's mundus inversus, you know. It's something that would happen in romanticism like, um, Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Everything is upside down. They love the dark, too. Mundus inversus, the world upside-down. It takes this terrible hierarchy and it flips it upside down so that the people who are doing the terrorizing, right, are no longer in power. And that's what Matthew represents above all. He's a carnival-esque character. These crazy things that he says, right? It keeps sounding weird and like, what's wrong with these people? Degenerates, right? But degeneracy has value. And even Matthew, who sounds tragic at the end of his screed, at one point he says, “I wish I never had a button up my middle.” That's a platonic, as in Plato, reference, because when androgynes were split two, our navel or our belly button, I wish I never had a button up my middle, is the scar of our severance into gender, into male and female and into not wholeness. So it's this fascist gaze that's making him miserable. He's not intrinsically miserable like maybe Stephen in The Well of Loneliness. Maybe she's intrinsically miserable. He's not. He's just being bombarded with this gaze, which will ultimately throw these characters that are depicted in the first chapter, throw 'em into gas chambers.

AMY: And he seems like he's screaming against it, unlike Stephen, who's just like, “This is the way it is.” You know, like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh a little bit more.

KIM: Who knew Winnie the Pooh would come into the Nightwood discussion?

AMY: That's a first. That is a first. Um, but yeah, and I think Matthew and all the characters really, if I have to give a visual to describe the sensation of listening to him and his stories, it brings me back to your novel, Craze, because you feature the scene in your book, Margaret. It's a fun house, where you're going in and it's loud and it's chaotic and it's disturbing, distorted. That is the experience of reading this novel for me was like walking through and seeing the mirrors and the swirling and the craziness. 

MARGARET: You're disturbing the status quo, and the status quo is Nazism. 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: And it's funny, 'cause when I was reading it, I was seeing it as the breakup story. I wasn't even paying attention to the coming doom of Nazism and that she's, you know, predicting that or whatever. 

MARGARET: That's perfectly understandable, right? That's what modernism is. You have to go with it and not worry about it. And then in the backward glance, you start to figure out what's really about.

AMY: Yeah. Okay. Let's talk really quick about this very poignant scene in the book, where Nora, this is a character that represents Djuna Barnes, she's visiting the doctor at his apartment where he's lying in his bed. He's kind of living in squalor, and this is where she discovers that he likes to secretly dress in drag. But she comes to him for help because she's in distress after this breakup, and they end up having a long conversation about the meaning of night. And "night" is sort of a metaphor for everything in the world that is dark or taboo or miserable. And Matthew has a really long soliloquy. Basically the whole chapter is him talking and, uh, Nora's trying to butt in, but he, um, has so much to say. This is a part I wanted to read. He says, “Have I not shut my eyes with the added shutter of the night and put my hand out? And it’s the same with girls,” he said, “those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish. These can never again live the life of the day. When one meets them at high noon they give off, as it were, a protective emanation, something dark and muted. The light does not become them any longer. They begin to have an unrecorded look. It is as if they were being tried by the continual blows of an unseen adversary. They acquire an “unwilling” set of features. They become old without reward, the widower bird sitting sighing at the turnstile of heaven, “Hallelujah! I am sticked! Skoll! Skoll! I am dying!”

I think that ties into what you were saying about subverting everything on its head. So tell me a little bit more about that, because I think in a paper that you wrote, you summed it up perfectly when you talked about the sanctity of all of this. There's a holiness to the night and to the debauched and the dark, right?

MARGARET: Yeah. That comes from the carnival-esque, that everything's upside-down. She talks about, in Nightwood, how there's day and night and there are two travels. And we talked about how there's history and legend, and then there's all these two travels, unconscious and unconscious. And so the night is then the recovery of the unconscious. The book says "the Bible lies one way the night down the other." And so when you start to recover the night, you start to recover these … you saw in your passage the “uns”: Unwilling, unseen, unrecorded, Freud's, uncanny. And the “un,” linguistically, “un” undoes those status quos. And that does something including the recovery of the unconscious. It does something to identity. It allows us to potentially recover wholeness and some of the ways that it sounds just so when people are reading through it, it sounds like things like "an angel on all fours." Or "may you be damned upwards." Do you hear the mundus inversus? May you be damned upward. So the night is about all of those recoveries in short.

KIM: Oh, that's thrilling actually. It's really fantastic.

AMY: Listeners, you can't see it, but Kim and I are just sitting here listening with like, our jaws dropped. Like, "What?!"

KIM: I'm like, whoa. Oh my God. Yeah. I can't wait to read this book again. So let's talk a little bit about, um, the moments in the book where Barnes's childhood trauma is maybe coming through. There's the reference to Red Riding Hood, and the Wolf dressed up as a grandmother at the start of the chapter. "God, children know something they can't tell. They like Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in bed." So let's talk a little bit about that and also where else we see that, Margaret. 

MARGARET: So you were attracted to that passage, right?

KIM: Yes. Very much. 

MARGARET: Why is that? Why does it attract you, that passage, do you think?

KIM: It is very visual. It goes back to what you were saying about, you know, um, myth and everything that has been around for a really long time. Um, there's darkness in it as well. 

AMY: Subverting, like the traditional, like I, I'm thinking of, um, why am I blanking on that writer from the seventies, Kim, that we did an episode on the fairytales? Angela Carter. Yeah. Like that, that sort of like, um, subverting those legends, you know, and being attracted to the darker, wronger part of yourself? 

MARGARET: Yeah. It's the bad girls. 

KIM: Yes. 

MARGARET: They're straying away from the path. And they're refusing repression. I think it attracts us in part because it reaches into our unconscious and it pulls these responses out and they're resistant responses. There's a way in which it's a litmus test, because some people like Wuthering Heights and some people like Jane Eyre, and some people like Sleeping Beauty and some people like, you know, the bad girls. It's like the recovery of the things that we were told we needed to repress. And we find it titillating, in part, because there's a sexual side to it in this novel, at the very least. But it's also a cautionary tale in the original because these fairy tales are very conservative, right? They're trying to tap back, if not, you know, completely destroy our capacity to resist, and our titillation at the idea of resistance.

AMY: Yeah, it reminds me too of, um, Matthew, the doctor, talks a lot about how different countries, culturally, have a different way of looking at the night. He's like, In America, you guys wash the sin away, you baptize yourselves to wash it with water and get rid of it. And he's like, in other countries we bathe in the sin. And so again, it's going back and embracing that darkness in yourself rather than trying to repress it or shut it out or pretend it's not there.

MARGARET: if you think about fascism, we are a puritanical country. When he talks about the washed countries, the two clean countries, the hygienic, that's a fascist word, right? There are certain cultures that don't feed into this nonsense. So this is very important. They are less repressed, in effect.

AMY: There are so many amazing passages in this novel. The imagery is unforgettable, but you could get lost trying to analyze it, as we've talked about. As Kim and I mentioned, it's more of a vibe that you have to just take in at times. The author Jeanette Winterson described it thus, she said, "Nightwood is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange. And reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined." I mean, first of all, amazing.

KIM: I love that. 

AMY: And I think it's true because A) you go back and again and again to this book because it just keeps drawing you back, I would imagine. I can already see myself needing to go back and read it again. And like things come to you after the fact, you know, and you just have to let it sink in

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

MARGARET: I think that when she says “its work,” I mean, modernism is almost like, to use the word religion again, they're really preaching something almost and they're really trying to effect something. They're trying to make something happen, and if this book does “its work,” quote unquote, then we'll never be the same. It means that we have access to something that is valuable, and also that if we don't have access to it, and this is important now as we know, a hundred years later, we're in big trouble. I mean, that's what's happening in the United States in many ways right now, that you have to let it do its work because what's at stake is everything.

KIM: This conversation is a key in the lock for me. I mean, I feel like I just understand this book so much more and love it even more than I already did. But let's talk about how it was received when it was published in 1936. Did people get it? What was the response? 

MARGARET: I mean, in short, it did nothing. You know, even Eliot, he knows it's brilliant, but I don't think he knew what it was about. And the critical response was at best, mixed, but it just didn't do anything. She's writing in a vocabulary that hasn't been canonized. We're not used to reading this stuff. So when you read Joyce, it's difficult, but you're like, Oh yes, this reminds me of blah-blah. Right? You read this and it’s not gonna remind you of anything. And that's why Woolf said, "we have to think back through our mothers." Not as a feminist, but rather we have to reconstruct the lineage and the tradition that books like this are coming out of because we can't appreciate them. And that's what happened with the critical response. And the popular response was non-existent.

KIM: Wow. 

AMY: I mean, we didn't even get into all the mother stuff in the book. I mean, at one point Robin has a baby and she holds the baby up over her head and she's about to slam the baby to the floor and smash its skull. That's another image that stuck with me always. And the dolls.

KIM: She does that to the dolls, too. 

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: So we mentioned The Well of Loneliness. We did an episode earlier this year on Radclyffe Hall, and we made an observation at the time that these two books represent two very different versions of queer literature.

AMY: We should note, too, that Barnes didn't think of herself as a lesbian. She was bisexual. And I suspect, Margaret, that you have some opinions in comparing these two women. I'd love to know how you see them in parallel to one another.

MARGARET: I loved your episode on The Well of Loneliness because you let it be what it was. My favorite part was when you said it was the "Okay, boomer" book. Yes, it's a pity party,that was good, too. But I mean, she was writing for the boomers, and Barnes is not writing for the boomers. But what's at stake is important historically, because Radclyffe Hall, yes, she was hanging out in the Barney salon, and yes, she was having fun, but she wasn't having the kind of fun the other ladies were having, because she was scarred. Because she was still under the spell of the sexologists, which you talked about. The sexologists believe you were born that way. They were essentialists. And in Barnes and Stein and Woolf, they don't believe that, for many reasons, but one of them is that essentialism gets you thrown into gas chambers, right? It's a potentially dangerous thing. They didn't think that sexuality needed to be codified. Woolf and Stein weren't quote unquote “lesbians” either, because they weren't invested in it as a phenomenon. And so my comparison of the two is that Nightwood is about a non-sex logical version of gender fluidity. And it's a more radical version of it.

KIM: We mentioned that T.S. Eliot was Barnes's editor at Faber and Faber,  and we talked about in the editing process, he excised bits of the novel. What do we know about what he deleted and how was the original different from the official published version?

MARGARET: Yeah. So the manuscripts at University of Maryland and, you can see that the excisions are approximately 15 pages. Basically, you know, in short, what it does is that it undermines the extent to which the redemptive aspects of degeneracy operate. In other words, he takes out some of the most degenerate, quote unquote material, especially, with reference to Matthew. It doesn't alter necessarily the meaning of the book, but again, it undermines the extent to which degeneracy is in some ways celebrated in the book. And what that means is we already sort of talked about that in terms of that the inversion and the degeneracy flips everything upside down. Inversion becomes mundus inversus. And I think that's the important thing about what he did to the book, but he could have ruined it. And again, we're not gonna wreck it for readers, but he could have ruined it by taking out the last chapter and then the book would've made no sense at all.

AMY: I can see though, as the editor being like, "Matthew's talked enough. I've gotta get rid of some of Matthew's speeches.”

KIM: Yeah. He just has such a strong presence. 

MARGARET: I love that you've ventriloquized Eliot. He would have appreciated that. 

KIM: Yeah, But I still feel that the last chapter, I liked going to Robin and Nora and focusing on that, and I feel like everything that was said about a dog finding both of them at the end and bringing them together, it sort of played out some of the things they talked about throughout the book, the things that Nora and Matthew talked about.

MARGARET: Right. And thematically you can hear it now, and this happens elsewhere in modernism. It happens in “The Wasteland,” for example, it's the mundus inversus of dog/God.

AMY: Mm. What? You're blowing my mind! Oh my gosh. So simple when you think about it. It's like, how did I miss that? Okay.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: So Margaret, you wrote about the queer scene in Jazz Age, Paris for your novel An American in Paris. That's the prequel to your latest novel, Craze, which is set in 1930s New York City at this same time when gender fluidity and homosexuality was more visible and socially acceptable. It was fascinating getting to read about that time period through your book. Because these two cities were so influential in Djuna Barnes' work, I'm sure you wanted to sprinkle in some of her aura.

MARGARET: Yes. I mean, originally for me, I mentioned earlier this sapphic lesbian Mecca of Paris. And that's the thing that first really drew me in. And I wanted to historicize that, to give faces to this cast of characters, which, they're not lost to history anymore, but they were when I wrote the book, 'cause it was a long time ago. So I wanted to bring them into the limelight, and that's why the first book was about Paris, because that was the female side of things, as it were. So there's a very big difference between New York and Paris. And what I wanted to do in Craze was to put the women back into the Pansy Craze. So I called it the Queer Craze, not the Pansy Craze, throughout the book. The other thing about New York that is not true of Paris that makes it very different is that you have the Harlem Renaissance figuring very prominently in what is a gay mecca.

Alain Locke, Countee Cullen and Bessie Smith, Carl Van Vechten, Langston Hughes, Gladys Bentley, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters. I mean, they're just all over the place. And the other difference between the two cities is that in Paris these were elites, right? There was a lot of privilege, that Guggenheim, you know, world. Whereas in New York there was a lot of slumming going on and you know, slumming had a virtue because it brought quote unquote “straight people,” whatever they are, into this queer scene because everything was illegal during Prohibition. So they all sort of came together and it wasn't this highbrow, you know, elitist, Paris. So each of the cities had a profound effect on who was in the books and what kind of people were expressing themselves through homosexuality.

AMY: Hmm. It's interesting to compare the two that way. 

KIM: Very interesting. 

AMY: Okay. So by 1940 (which, gosh, that seems pretty early on. Wow) the years were beginning to take their toll on Djuna. She had a drinking problem and had attempted suicide. After returning to America on the cusp of World War II, her family had her committed to a sanitorium. So here we go, Netflix special. It's getting wild again. Um, so she's committed to a sanitorium in Lake George, New York to recover from alcohol abuse. She was furious with her family for this, and she wound up getting even with them by writing a very disquieting play. It was basically kind of her last literary work. It's called “The Antiphon,” and it's about a family reunion where old traumas are brought to light in a confrontation between a middle-aged daughter and her mother. And Barnes actually considered this play her most important work, but it was only staged one time in Sweden because the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, was friends with Djuna, and he did her a favor by agreeing to stage it. Do you know anything about this work, Margaret? It sounds pretty fascinating, like a horrific family reunion where stuff goes sideways.

MARGARET: It's the most bizarre of all of our works. She did write it to punish her family, allegedly, for putting her in the sanitarium. It's about the way her mother, in particular, was complicit in the abuse perpetrated on her by her father. And the mother ultimately kills the Djuna character, as it were. The grandmother's not in there, which suggests that Djuna didn't blame the grandmother to the extent that she might have been, again, to use the word complicit or even a perpetrator in the childhood abuse. You can debate that out, but she's not in this. And it takes place in this little dollhouse. It's so creepy. And they're moving around these little figures. I mean, it's really awful. It's not just to punish her family. It's also a way to talk about her disgust and disquiet at these gender politics that make such abuse possible. And a hundred years later, again, we're enmeshed in all of the scandals and the victims that are coming up today. Not just #MeToo, but with Epstein, et cetera. It's actually reflected in the title because an “antiphon” is a response to the dominant voice, right? It's a kind of talking back to that dominant voice.

AMY: I would love to actually give a shout out to John Macy. He wrote an incredible graphic biography of Djuna Barnes that came out last year. It is an absolutely terrific overview of Barnes's Life story. I loved it so much, and it covers so many of the people in her milieu that we talked about today. Um, you know, the Paris salon scene, all of that. I cannot recommend it enough. There's so much to her story, in fact, that we didn't even have time to tap into it all here, but you can find it in John Macy's book, so go check that out.

KIM: I loved it too, Amy, and also go pick up a copy of Margaret's two novels, Craze, and An American in Paris to get a fictionalized glimpse into this offbeat world that Djuna Barnes inhabited.

AMY: They're terrific reads. Margaret, thanks so much for joining us. We can't think of a better person to help us figure out Djuna Barnes. I mean, we still don't have her figured out, let's be frank, but I think she's far less intimidating now than she was when we first set out to feature her on this show. And that, we realize now there is a method to her madness and you just gotta keep digging and parsing, and understanding the historical context, which you helped us with today. So listeners, please give her a try. It's worth the effort.

MARGARET: Thanks so much you guys. This is really fun and, for me, enlightening.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Kim and I will be back in two more weeks with another lost lady for you, and if that's too long to wait for you, consider becoming a patron of this podcast. You can become a paid subscriber at Apple Podcasts to get our two extra monthly bonus episodes, or you can go to our Patreon page. Visit lost ladies of lit.com and click Become a Patron to find out more you can actually double your intake of Lost Ladies of Lit goodness . Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.