| Those looking for
geographic synchronicities will take not of the fact that
during a seminal period in the life of Djuna Barnes, a central
figure in the expatriate writing communities of Paris and
Berlin in the 20s and 30s, and later a reclusive and legendary
denizen of Greenwich Village, was spent on a family farm in
Huntington - only a few miles from the birthplace of Walt
Whitman.
A biography by Phillip Herring, entitled "Djuna: The
Life and work of Djuna Barnes (Viking, 1995), corroborated
by checking the 1909 Belcher Hyde maps of the Huntington area,
reveals that the family of Djuna Barnes, whose family name
at the time was Gusafson, resided in what was then known as
"Upper Half Hollow Road," today's Half Hollow Road
just west of Deer Park Road in the southern portion of the
town. Zadel bought two parcels of property on July 1, 1902,
near what was then known as "Heck's Drug Store"
a few hundred yards west of Deer Park Road; it was not til
the age of twenty that she moved from the family farm into
New York City; and while Djuna moved to Greenwich Village
and began associating with artists and writers there as early
as 1915, Zadel continued to live on the farm til her dying
day in 1917.
The association with Huntington is not just a passing one,
it seems, though the impact on Barnes can scarcely be thought
of as being of the kind recollected by America's "Good
Gray Poet." As told by biographers, the complex character
of Barnes' persona, the conflicts she exhibited regarding
sexuality and interpersonal relationships, was in no small
measure formed during her childhood experiences at the farm.
Primarily known in American literary circles today for The
Book Of Repulsive Women, a collection viewed widely as overtly
lesbian poems, Barnes' literary output was once lionized by
the likes of TS Eliot and Peggy Guggenheim, and two of her
novels - Ryder and Nightwood - were considered vital reading
in the modernist canon. A sought after columnist and essayist
on the New York journalistic scene, like her grandmother Zadel
before her, Barnes' colorful lifestyle in the inner circle
of the American avante garde and later expatriate community
both revealed her socially radical leanings and obscured the
forthright and daring in her literary work.
Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) has long been seen as a near legendary
figure by her admirers, and in recent decades has taken a
place among the ranks of the major American authors of her
era.
Her circle included many legendary figures - in her early
years with figures like Edna St Vincent Millay and Eugene
O'Neill; later, to modernists and surrealists that included
Gertrude Stein and Charles Henri Ford, Ernest Hemingway and
Mina Loy, Berenice Abbott and William Carlos Williams, James
Joyce and Kay Boyle. And over the course of her flamboyant
early years the combination of overt challenging of social
conventions with a deeper need for privacy caused her work
and her personality to be confused and misunderstood by many.
These days she is held up by gay and lesbian writers as an
important early example of forthrightness and courage in addressing
these themes; however, as in other matters, Barnes' sexual
orientation was far more complex than that - and in fact,
was deeply influenced by the singular household life she experienced
on the farm in Half Hollow Hills.
It seems that Zadel, her grandmother, was a product of the
Free Love movement of the late 19th century and according
to Herring, the farm on Upper Half Hollow Hills road - which
she owned, and which Djuna's father Wald was primary figure
in after Zadel - was home to a lifestyle that included multiple
marriages, wideranging liaisons and the distinct suggestion
of incest. Through the rest of her life, biographers suggest,
the boundaries of Barnes' romantic and emotional relationships
were profoundly shaped by this period of her pre-teen and
teenaged years, providing her with both a broader range of
acceptable behavior than many other people, and at the same
time a negativity and pessimism perhaps brought on by the
traumatic experiences of that time.
In books like Nightwood, she examines with barely concealed
venom and vindictiveness events in her relationship with Thelma
Wood, her lover for many years in Paris, a process that not
only provided searing drama and explosive writing to readers,
but after its publication violent reactions in some of the
individuals she fictionalized.
In poems from "The Book of Repulsive Women," her
ambiguity about the scope and nature of the intimacies in
her life are made manifest. Originally published in the landmark
chapbook series by Bruno of Greenwich Villlage in 1915, the
volume of poetry presents portraits of women of the period
- a mother, a prostitute, cabaret dancer and others - which
critic Douglas Messerli explains were wildly radical in their
day, 'dominated as it was by Victorian mores. There is still
"in these rhythms," he notes, "a seething beat
of sexuality and vice, whipped up into a delicious sense of
perversity by Barnes' art."
What Messerli does not mention is a palpable sense of disallusionment,
ennui and even contempt - beyond what is found in other modernist
writing of the era, as in this passage from Seen From The
El: "So she stands - nude - stretching dully/Two amber
combs loll through her hair/A vague molested carpet pitches/Down
the dusty length of stair/She does not see she does not care/It's
always there." Or here, from the poem From Fifth Avenue
Up: "Someday beneath some hard/Capricious star..We'll
know you for the woman you are...With your legs half strangled/In
your lace/You'd lip the world to madness/On your face."
Through the texts of her life and her writing, Djuna Barnes
tantalizingly reveals and hides the woman she was - and how
her years living in Half Hollow Hills so indelibly shaped
her character and disposition.
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