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Immersion

A Book by Djuna Barnes. Boni and Liveright

The Dial, May 1924, 460–461

Some considerable time past, when reviewing a book in The Dial, I had occasion to speak of immersion-in-life with a somewhat categorical disapproval. Since then, this has lain on the conscience. For though I still feel that the book belittled was an inferior one, and inferior precisely because of its patient and dutiful immersion in life, it has seemed that the category itself should be revised. For in art a category can be degraded or justified by the individual instance exemplifying it.

The reading of Miss Barnes’ book makes the revision imperative. The author of these stories, plays, poems, and drawings is undoubtedly immersed—and to such an extent that if you have the modern interest in the mechanics of writing you must wonder how eager her preoccupations must have been to have made her miss so much. Yet her pages have a force, an ingenuity, which rises purely from the intensity of her message.

Miss Barnes seems to have seized upon the form nearest to hand, the one-acter, and to have shaped all her subjects to this simple mold. To wit: there is a situation, this situation is followed by a general jog-trot of plot for so long, and then, with only two or three hundred words to go, the author seizes a knife or a pistol, or stages an incestuous kiss, or something similar—in short, unwinds the rest of her plot with a snap, and the story is over.

If one is looking for an astute and concentrated method of writing, then, one will not find it in any of Miss Barnes’ paragraphs. There are no interior designs, no “functioning” sentences. The occasional shame-faced attempts at an epigram are nearly always painful. So that we must situate the appeal of this book precisely in the vigour of her attitudes, in her immersion. Nor are these attitudes themselves unimpeachable. A great deal is weak Russian, a great deal is old stuff; Miss Barnes’ vamps, for instance, are almost as pat as movie vamps.

I spoke of a force or ingenuity rising purely from the intensity of her message. The opening of her story “Oscar” is a good example of what I mean. It begins with four descriptions: a place, a woman, a man, another man. A priori it should be safe to say that a story should not begin with such a Walter Scott sameness. Yet these very pages have a swift stride. Of one of the men:

He smelled very strongly of horses, and was proud of it. He pretended a fondness for all that goes under hide or hair, but a collie bitch, known for her gentleness, snapped at him and bit him. He invariably carried a leather thong, braided at the base for a handle, and would stand for hours talking, with his legs apart, whirling this contrived whip, and, looking out of the corner of his eyes would pull his moustache, waiting to see which of the ladies would draw in her feet.

The other descriptions are equally firm. The effect is probably gained by the fact that the descriptions themselves are plots. Another instance of how Miss Barnes can produce results by the sheer earnestness of her conception is in the dialogue, “To the Dogs.” Gheid Storm, a direct and unsubtle young man, comes to Helena Hucksteppe “in the mountains of Cornwall-on-Hudson” to offer her himself. She proves, to the satisfaction of him and the reader, that he could not make things very interesting for this advanced and rather vampish lady. Time and again he puts out a statement, and her answer is designed to kill it; thus, a topic is exhausted by his sentence and her reply—yet Miss Barnes manages, along with this effect, to keep up the illusion of continuity in the dialogue.

In A Book the will to tragedy is maintained with a sureness which is very rarely met with in contemporary writing. And if the author does not convince us that her stories carry very far beyond themselves, she does make us feel that this little corner of experience she is dealing with is handled with the adequate reactions. By which I mean that we can accept the fatalities of her stories, and perhaps even feel that the last bit of plot unwinding with its snap really belonged to the texture of her subject. In her drawings this will to tragedy is equally convincing. Her portraits seem to possess that strained attitude in living which goldfish have when sucking air at the surface of a bowl. Her poetry, again, carries the same vein. At best it is hot, tight, and sullen. The whole, put into one book, produces a very satisfactory program.