Lost in Still Water

SELECTED WORKS OF DJUNA BARNES (366 pp.)--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($5.95).

Djuna Barnes has long been the dark lady of the New Directions anthologies, and in the '30s, when difficult writers were in vogue, her shadowy short novel Nightwood won the loftiest of testimonials. Every earnest Lit. undergraduate read the New Classics edition, with its foreword by T. S. Eliot praising its "great achievement of style, beauty of phrasing, brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy."

As the centerpiece of this collection of Djuna Barnes' work, Nightwood still has its moments of beauty and wild wit. The novel's chief strength is a marvelous ranter, "Dr. Matthew-Mighty grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor." He roars on for pages, mocking himself as a wretched transvestite, reviling dead gods and performing feats of verbal wire-walking, all to take a distraught Lesbian's mind off her wandering mate. "Do you know," he says in lyrical exasperation, "what has made me the greatest liar this side of the moon? Telling my stories to people like you, to take the mortal agony out of their guts, and stop them from rolling about, and drawing up their feet, and screaming, with their eyes staring over their knuckles . .."

But one moonstruck liar in a life of writing is hardly enough. The rest of what Author Barnes has written offers little but annoying, calculated imprecisions ("her wide distilling mouth") and somber oboe passages. "No, I don't feel horror," someone says. "Horror must include conflict, and I have none; I am alien to life, I am lost in still water." So, most of the time, is Author Barnes. And even Nightwood suffers from that most irritating offense of difficult writing--the mysterioso effect that hides no mystery, the locked box with nothing in it.

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