The Barnes Among Women

When Djuna Barnes showed her first oil painting, Portrait of Alice, at Peggy Guggenheim's Manhattan gallery last week, many critics were surprised to find that the woman who wrote Nightwood (1937) could paint with similar distinction. In Nightwood no less magisterial and exacting a critic than T. S, Eliot found "the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy."

Now the output of original and talented Djuna Barnes consists of a total of six paintings and six peculiar books. The Portrait of Alice is a full-length study of a woman in a burgundy robe standing against a background of gold. It suggests the quality as well as the style of the great Italian primitives. Asked last week how she came to paint Alice (1934), Djuna Barnes said: "I asked myself one day, why not paint a painting? ... I painted most of it on my hands & knees, because I couldn't afford an easel."

Thin, pale, 50-year-old Djuna Barnes was born in Cornwall-on-the-Hudson. Her father was a jack of all talents who played five musical instruments, so disliked his father that he changed his name Buddington to Barnes. Djuna was named after Prince Djalma in The Wandering Jew, but her young brother's mispronunciation changed everything. She prefers to call herself The Barnes.

The Barnes studied art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, later at Manhattan's Art Students' League. She started to earn her living on the Brooklyn Eagle as an illustrator and reporter. For the New York Press she covered "Gyp the Blood." For the World she did "stunt" stories, including being hugged by a New York gorilla, being forcibly fed in order to tell what it felt like. For McCall's Magazine she went (o Europe, interviewed the American-born Duchess of Marlborough in her fabulous Blenheim Palace. Said the Duchess: "This may be a palace, but there isn't one decent bathroom in the whole bloody place."

In 1928 her novel Ryder, written in many different styles, parodyed Fielding, the Bible, Chaucer. That same year The Barnes published, privately and anonymously, her self-illustrated Ladies Almanack ("showing their Signs and their tides; their Moons and their Changes; the Seasons as it is with them; their Eclipses and Equinoxes; as well as a full Record of diurnal and nocturnal Distempers"). Says The Barnes: "By tramping the Paris streets I sold about 500 copies to bookstores and friends. Ten copies shipped to the U.S. were banned. The remainder are in France, in the hands of the Nazis."

With Nightwood, critics began to be impressed. Nightwood was filled with such passages as the eloquent Dr. O'Connor's description of his London evening: "Well I went off under London Bridge, and what should I see? A Tuppeny Upright! And do you know what a Tuppeny Upright might be? A Tuppeny is an old-time girl, and London Bridge is her last stand, as the last stand for a grue is Marseilles if she doesn't happen to have enough pocket money to get to Singapore. For tuppence, an Upright is all anyone can expect. They used to walk along slowly, all ruffles and rags, with big terror hats on them, a pin stuck over the eye and slap up through the crown, half their shadows on the ground and the other half crawling along the wall beside them; ladies of the haute sewer taking their last stroll, sauntering on their last Rotten Row, going slowly along in the dark, holding up their badgered flounces, or standing still, silent and as indifferent as the dead, as if they were thinking of better days, or waiting for something that they had been promised when they were little girls; their poor damned dresses hiked up and falling away over the rump, all gathers and braid, like a Crusader's mount, with all the trappings gone sideways with misery."

In a dark, one-room apartment in Greenwich Village last week Djuna Barnes said she was "writing one more book, painting one more picture," felt she was "going slightly mad."

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