| Djuna Barnes |
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EARLY LIFE AND WRITINGS Barnes was born into Cornwall-on-Hudson , a New York artists' colony. Her father, Henry Budington Barnes, was an unsuccessful artist and her mother, Elizabeth Chappel, had studied violin in England before her marriage. Barnes was brought up by her mother and grandmother and she received her early education at home. She was sexually abused by both her father and her grandmother, a factor which strongly influenced her later work. In the early 1910s, she studied art briefly in New York City at both the Pratt Institute and the Arts Students League . By . PERSONAL LIFE It has long been known that Barnes was primarily lesbian. When she lived in Greenwich Village she had an affair with Mary Pyne, and she met and lived for a time with noted photographer , among others. {Link without Title} Obsession, the Barnes/Wood affair Barnes and sculptress Thelma Ellen Wood began a passionate relationship that lasted from 1921 to 1929 . Wood was a former lesbian lover to Berenice Abbott, and they met one another through her. Fueled by sex, alcohol, infidelities, jealousy, and violence, the relationship was said to have been the "great love" of each of their lives. The two women fought often, often in front of their friends and colleagues, usually in a jealous rage over one or the other having flirted with or slept with another woman. They would often hit or throw things at one another, which would be followed by passionate making up and coddling. It was during this time that Barnes was secretly involved with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay also became involved romantically with Wood, spawning one of the couples greatest fights. The relationship ended badly when Wood began an affair with the wealthy Henriette McCrea Metcalf (1888-1981). [http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biow3/wood05.html LATER WRITINGS AND PLAYS Barnes' first published her poetry in 1915 as a collection of "rhythms and drawings" entitled ''The Book of Repulsive Women''. She also wrote one-act plays, three of which were produced at the Provincetown Playhouse in the period 1919 - 1920 . She married Courtenay Lemon but the marriage was short-lived and in 1920 she moved to Paris on an assignment for '' McCall's '' magazine. PARIS Djuna Barnes arrived in Paris with letters of introduction to Ezra Pound and James Joyce and she soon entered the Parisian world of expatriate bohemians who were at the forefront of the Modernist movement in literature and art. Her circle included Pound, Joyce, Gertrude Stein , Robert McAlmon , Nathalie Barney , Peggy Guggenheim , and Kay Boyle . She also maintained a friendship with the Italian poet Eugenio Montale . Pound disliked Barnes and her writing. However, she developed a close literary and personal friendship with Joyce, who discussed his work with Barnes more freely than he did with most other writers, and who allowed her to call him Jim, a name otherwise only used by his wife, Nora Barnacle . Barnes considered Joyce a great writer and a source of inspiration, but unlike many other Paris expatriates, she was not overawed by him. She was also promoted by Ford Madox Ford , who published her work in his ''Transatlantic Review'' magazine. In Paris, Barnes set up home with her lover Thelma Wood and soon won a reputation as both being openly lesbian and a heavy drinker, which in later years detracted from her reception as a writer. Barnes published a second book, a mixture of prose and poetry called ''A Book'' in 1926 . In 1928 she brought out a semi-autobiographical novel in a mock- Elizabethan style, ''Ryder'' that became a best seller in the United States . She also anonymously published a satirical '' Roman à Clef '' of Paris lesbian life called ''Lady's Almanack'' that same year. An enlarged edition of ''A Book'' called ''A Book - A Night Among the Horses'' appeared in 1929 . ''NIGHTWOOD'' Barnes left Paris in 1931 , when her relationship with Thelma Wood ended, and she lived for a time in both London and New York. Her reputation as a writer was made when her novel ''Nightwood'' was published in England in 1936 in an expensive edition by Faber And Faber , and in America in 1937 by Harcourt, Brace And Company , with an added introduction by T. S. Eliot. The novel, set in Paris in the 1920s , revolves around the lives of five characters, two of whom are based on Barnes and Wood, and it reflects the circumstances surrounding the ending of their real-life love affair. In his introduction, Eliot praises Barnes' style, which while having "prose rhythm that is prose style, and the musical pattern which is not that of verse, is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." NEW YORK Barnes returned to Paris briefly in 1937 to sell the apartment that she and Wood had shared. She moved to New York in 1941 , where she became a recluse, living in a small apartment at 5 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village . Her neighbours included the poet E. E. Cummings . Despite failing health which eventually saw her completely confined to her apartment, she published several more works, including the Surrealist verse play, ''The Antiphon'' in 1958 . This play was translated into Swedish by Karl Ragnar Gierow and U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and was staged in Stockholm in 1962 . Barnes has been cited as an influence by writers as diverse as Truman Capote , William Goyen , Isak Dinesen , John Hawkes , and Anais Nin . She was elected to the National Institute Of Arts And Letters in 1961 . She was the last surviving member of the first generation of English-language modernists when she died in New York in 1982. WORKS
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