Virtual Modernism: Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era

4. Wonder and Decay: Djuna Barnes’s New York

· 139 ·· CHAPTER 4 · Wonder and Decay Djuna Barnes’s New York To the ever-repeated sensations with which the daily press serves its public he opposes the eternally fresh “news” of the history of creation: the eternally renewed, the uninterrupted lament. —Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus” Although there were many former journalists among the crowd of expatriate American women writers living in Paris during the storied 1920s and 1930s, by the time she arrived in 1921, Djuna Barnes, the author of the much-acclaimed modernist novel Nightwood (1936), had had a particularly dramatic career. Like several of her contemporaries, Barnes had written for magazines such as Vanity Fair, Theater Guild, and the New Yorker before leaving the United States and continued to do so from abroad. However, in contrast to her often more genteel contemporaries on the left bank, she had also written for nearly every newspaper in New York City. Beginning in 1913, Barnes had supported herself, her newly divorced mother, and her younger brothers by publishing more than a hundred articles and interviews, in addition to dramas and short stories, in the daily papers.1 Entertainment was the mandate of much of this work. Barnes was frequently engaged in publicizing lower-class amusements, such as the circus and the Coney Island freak show, as “safe” for middleclass audiences. The period’s rage for “slumming tours” and for the emerging leisure-time activity of tourism is also evident in much of her writing. She provided firsthand accounts of trips into mysterious ethnic locales in New York, wrote a series exposing her own neighborhood of “bohemian” Greenwich Village to curious uptown eyes, and produced short articles on “local color” in and around Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. 140 WONDER AND DECAY However, Barnes’s glamorous later life as a Parisian expatriate and an experimental modernist writer between the wars has tended to make us forget that she also contributed to social problem journalism.2 While her articles between 1913 and 1921 often profiled artists, writers, and performers , she also wrote about the unjust sentencing of criminals, including a mother stealing bread for her children; the lives of down-and-out squatters near Coney Island; a suffrage rally and a “suffrage school” for women; the closing of the Arbuckle, a floating residence hotel for impoverished working women; and a meeting of the Industrial Workers of the World. There was also a reform angle to her pieces publicizing entertainments for middle-class audiences; the “cleaning up” of public culture was a priority of the vice commissions that had been established in many American cities , including New York, by the early years of Barnes’s career. Their mandate was to shine a light not only on “sexual slavery,” or prostitution, but also “sexual perversion,” generally meaning homosexuality.3 There is a compelling tension between the commercial function of Barnes’s journalism and its reformist bent. Reform itself could be fun to watch—even sexy—a fact that becomes particularly evident in her “stunt” work. Perhaps the most striking articles Barnes wrote were the ones where she became a female stunt journalist, in the tradition of Nellie Bly, for Joseph Pulitzer’s sensational New York World. Documented in photographs, she underwent force-feeding to publicize the plight of hunger-striking suffragists, “interviewed” a large gorilla at the Bronx Zoo, attended a boxing match, and was “rescued” from an apartment building by firefighters in training. Putting her body on display, Barnes engaged in a type of personal and embodied reporting indebted to the conventions of newspaper reform journalism by women but updated for the emerging mass market. Providing a so-called women’s angle on pressing social issues, she not only reported on the news but herself became the news, by selling her own alluring persona and image. Critical approaches to Barnes’s work have tended to focus not on her journalism but instead on her later “major” works, particularly Nightwood. In this chapter, I argue that the most striking aspect of her later work— her “baroque” style—owes its origin to the social problem journalism she wrote in her youth. The 1936 Nightwood, as many have noted, flaunts its opacity and revels in its artificiality, drawing more attention to the surface of language than to what language has to say. The novel is filled with digressive, ornamental flourishes; obscure comparisons; epigrams; WONDER AND DECAY 141 and unexpected and unusual juxtapositions, all of which...