Category Archives: Djuna Barnes

Drawing on the Walls at Shakespeare & Company

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Badaude is the bomb.  But you knew that; she's the one who designed the wonderful new banner for my blog this summer.  And apparently that task was quite inspiring to her, for when she met Sylvia Whitman in September at the Five Dials party (recounted here and here and here and documented here– this one caught me and Badaude sitting on a bench, front and center!) she suggested doing the same thing to Sylvia's wall that she did to my blog! And the result is so fantastic I can't even tell you! Look:

Shakes photo

But I'm not the only one who thinks Badaude's the bomb. BOMB thinks she is too! So Paul Morris interviewed her and you can read it here. An excerpt:

Paul Morris: Your illustrations are an interesting
fusion of image and text. How does your experience as an artist inform
your appreciation for literature in general—and for literary figures in
particular?

Joanna Walsh: [...] My drawing always relates to
writing, whether because I’m responding to a text or mixing my own
writing and pictures. Writers are also “commercial” artists—books have
to sell to a certain number of people in order to be published. This
doesn’t mean that I think “blockbusters” are better than “literary
fiction” because they sell more, but I am interested in the knife-edge
balancing act whereby writers write what they have to in such a way
that enough readers will want to go out and buy a copy.

In drawing the Shakespeare & Company writers—looking at the way
they presented themselves in the reference photos I used-I became
interested in how the image of being, and the story of becoming, a
published writer in Paris was so central to the myth their lives; a
myth so hugely attractive it frequently became their subject matter (Quartet, A Moveable Feast, Tropic of Cancer). This is why I chose the quote from Ulysses
(full excerpt at bottom), hidden in the wallpaper design of the mural,
in which Stephen Dedalus remembers his “Latin Quarter hat,” “puce
gloves,” and other “Paris fads” with which he—and no doubt his
hipster-goatee’d creator—furnished his Paris persona.

Here, on her own blog, she explains what it was like to draw on the walls of a 17th century building. (I made myself useful by erasing her pencil marks, handing her pens, and shelving books in the children's section with Sylvia and Gemma. Hey, if I'm only ever a handmaiden to genius, that's enough for me.)

And here is the text of the wonderful quote from Ulysses that snakes its way through the William Morris-inspired "wallpaper":

“My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want
puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other
devil’s name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: physiques, chimiques et
naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of
Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone:
when I was in Paris, boul’ Mich’, I used to. Yes, used to carry punched
tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere.
Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner
was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie,
overcoat, nose. Lui, c’est moi. You seem to have enjoyed yourself.”

TS Eliot’s first thoughts on Nightwood

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Faber

Alexander Chee pulled this out of the Faber archives and posted it on Twitter yesterday (I'm starting to think he's rooting around in my dissertation for inspiration!). It's TS Eliot's recommendation that Faber publish Nightwood.

Eliot sort of adopted Barnes, acting on her behalf to get the novel published, and contributing an introduction once it was.  The theory of course being that if someone with as exalted taste as TS Eliot endorsed Barnes's book, it would appeal to a more general audience. And who knows– maybe it would improve his street cred, too, as the father of modernism struggled to stay relevant with the cognoscenti in the late 1930s. (Kind of like if James Wood wrote the introduction to a really far-out experimental prose-poem published by Salt or Soft Skull, to show he really isn't a curmudgeon about anything that isn't Flaubertian realism.)*

Of course, more recent feminist critics have scoffed at Eliot's introduction, reading it as a condescending attempt to legitimize or control this uncontrollable carnivalesque text. (Out of curiosity, I wonder what James Wood thinks of Nightwood? Now that would be an essay worth reading.) If this is the case, I'm sure it was not Eliot's intention to do so; rather, his idiom is so different from Barnes's that the introduction seems a little absurd, given the kind of language that follows. And Eliot seems to be aware of this: "When the question is raised, of writing an introduction to a book of a creative order, I always feel that the few books worth introducing are exactly those which it is an impertinence to introduce." He then goes on to express his doubt that he has understood the novel– he says only that it took him "some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole," and that he believes it will appeal mainly to readers of poetry.

In my view, this is because the novel's language is at once so radical– just as Eliot himself was once perceived to be– and so deeply entrenched in the English literary tradition (not to mention the French and the German) that it calls for readers who are accustomed to truly paying attention to the language of what they are reading.  To say of a novel that it deserves to be read by those who read poetry is, I think, high praise. ( Andrew Seal further considers this aspect of Eliot's introduction.)

If you have not read Nightwood, may I urge you to order it immediately from Powell's or the Book Depository?

*Not that he is. He loved Rifka Galchen, didn't he? & etc. I personally don't care if he is or isn't.  And I do love TS Eliot– Prufrock, The Wasteland and the essays you have to read in grad school, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Ulysses, Order, and Myth." And, of course, if you are familiar with these essays, then it makes perfect sense that Eliot would have appreciated Nightwood.