Bluesky

Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood made her reputation, and with good reason. Reading the novel for the first time is an initiation into the ambivalent splendor of language: While ostensibly a story of unrequited love, its real pleasures come from Barnes’s ornate and contradictory prose, with every page brimming with beautiful paradoxes and enigma. She is not known for her short stories, however, which sometimes feel as if they were written by a different person. In these stories, written across Barnes’s life and published in avant-garde literary magazines such as The Little Review, the passionate drives and enormous appetites in Barnes’s novels become tiny explosions of thought and feeling that more often than not shrink back into a kind of elegant paralysis.

Published this autumn in a new collection, I Am Alien to Life, edited and with a foreword by Merve Emre, Barnes’s short stories are strange, mechanical offerings that exhibit characters and events that feel as determined as clockwork. Men and women take to their beds in nameless pan-European towns and lament the decay of their bloodlines. When they speak to one another, they do so in elaborate sequences of cryptic self-disclosure. Characters enter the scene by melancholy carriages or assertive steam trains, and they exit by dying, preferably by horse. They are surrounded by boudoirs and bonbons, breeches and bouffant skirts. Sometimes they are like food: We encounter “a great soft puff-paste of a woman” and a dead woman whose yellow hair falls across her face “like pats of plaited butter.” At all times the narrative is flat, bright, and stage-managed; Barnes pushes one thing here and then another there or pulls up a curtain to reveal a shiny new object. There is a lot of fever and a lot of whispering. People like to snarl before they speak. They are often tragique.

“A Night Among the Horses,” published in 1919, is the most exemplary story in the collection and expresses Barnes’s preoccupation with failed or partial transformations. Here a wealthy woman, Freda Buckler, attempts to change her groom, John, into a gentleman. Her ambitions are thwarted: We first encounter John crawling on his hands and knees through the undergrowth, still in evening dress, and her efforts are recounted in retrospect. Freda tells John, “I’ll make a gentleman out of you. I’ll step you up from being a ‘thing,’” but the irony is that she is a thing herself, with “a battery for a heart and the body of a toy” and a “wide distilling mouth” that emits a relentless mechanical buzz. She gives him an imperative—“You will rise”—but in the end John rejects her for his horses and the masked ball for the field. This rejection comes too late; John’s horses do not recognize him in his suit and trample him to death.

Freda attempts to bring John up to an acceptable level of artifice, but he ends up stranded somewhere in between, “neither what he was nor what he had been.” John has already become “a thing half standing, half crouching” as he stumbles across the field on all fours; the story’s final tragedy is that Freda’s artifice, which is the artifice of culture, art, and ornamentation, human artifice, has successfully masked nature too, and John’s familiar horses race by with their “legs rising and falling like savage needles taking purposeless stitches.” Yet these are not natural horses but narrative horses, and it makes sense that they are like Freda, who acts with “the mindless intensity of a mechanical toy kicking and raking about the floor” because they were always already the writer’s creatures. What Freda has done is open John’s eyes to the painted nature of the sky above his head.

After this, suddenly everything else begins to look like machinery too. The choice to begin I Am Alien to Life with “A Night Among the Horses” makes obvious the high place in which we encounter the other figures that inhabit the rest of the collection: They are both the products of, and well-armed with, the “culture” that Freda uses to torment John. This culture makes them almost inhuman. The title of the collection arrives about midway through, in the story “Spillway,” when a consumptive, Julie Anspacher, returning from the sanatorium, tries to explain herself to her husband. Her impassioned speech declaims an inability to feel within conventional terms. When he asks her whether she is capable of horror, Julie replies, “No, I don’t feel horror––horror must include conflict, and I have none; I am alien to life, I am lost in still water.” It’s an interesting claim, and one I found myself thinking of often as I read.

Unlike the ecstatic and torrential characters of Nightwood, the figures in Barnes’s short stories, written across her career and alongside her novels, are not alien to life because they exceed its scope: For the most part, they are astonishingly lifeless. A woman like a toy appears only in the first story, but it’s hard not to read the stilted, awkward figures of the ones that come afterward in its wake as badly made puppets in a brightly lit theater. Sometimes their imprisoning images––the qualities that make them so thing-like, so clockwork––are precise and beautiful. There are Zelka’s eyes moving beneath her eyebrows “like the barrel of a well-kept gun” in “Smoke,” or the Madame’s eyebrows in “Who Is This Tom Scarlett?,” which “twitch over her eyes like long black whips goading her eyeballs on to hate and menace.”

Sometimes the sheer obviousness of the narrative machinery and the shallowness of the setting are almost painful, as in the opening of “Oscar,” where we are told, “Strange things had happened in this country town. Murder, theft, and little girls found weeping, and silent morose boys scowling along in the ragweed, with half-shut sunburned eyelids,” or the repetitive descriptions in “Cassation,” where the narrator’s assertion, “Everything was disorderly, and expensive and melancholy,” is followed by an almost identical assertion on the next page: “Everything was important and old and gloomy.” Formulae pile up; the same backdrops are hauled out over and over again. Barnes writes like an American tourist in a reconstituted and bloodless Europe, but this makes sense, because that’s exactly what she was—an American abroad in the great age of American tourism, a member of Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation” drifting in the wake of the war—and because “Things are like that, when one travels, nicht wahr, Madame?”

Perhaps the distance between Nightwood and Barnes’s short stories simply has to do with the nature of the latter form. The intensity of feeling that spills across the pages of the novel is transformed into the wooden figures and tropes corralled into the enclosure of the short story, while the cumulative mystery of her characters’ frantic monologues becomes frustrating when reframed as stunted dialogue or coy description. Perhaps Barnes is pouring herself into too small a container: Dynamics that might have space to unfold in the novel are cut off here before they have a chance to get going. Or perhaps Barnes is playing a complex game with her favorite figures, the elderly aristocrats and dazzled ingenues forced into even narrower and ever more brightly painted settings, and so reading them requires a different state of mind, a suspended desire for character and plot, a more attentive eye for the beautiful and obscure.

At their best, the stories make a serious demand of their reader, which is something rare and special. When met with drives that seem to have no origin and actions that appear incomprehensible, you have to read between the lines, surmise, guess at meaning. There’s a line I returned to in “Aller et Retour” where the narrative voice describes “the lane of flowering trees with their perfumed cups, the moss that leaded the broken paving stones, the hot musky air, the incessant rustling wings of unseen birds––all ran together in a tangle of singing textures, light and dark.” It’s a line that makes me think of reading. It’s your job to untangle light from dark, to figure it all out. And that aside, it’s worth making the effort with this collection, even if just for the strength of certain images. There are arresting moments, as when Madame von Bartmann wanders through Marseille at night and observes the city’s prostitutes, “full-busted sirens with sly cogged eyes.” It’s hard to decipher what “cogged” means in this context, but it compounds the force of “sly” while evoking the same mindless, mechanical intensity ascribed to other women in the collection, with the cogs whirring in their brains and bodies as they make their calculations and act upon them. In “Dusie,” the movements of the story’s namesake are “like vines growing over a ruin,” and the source of her mysterious charm is that “something in her grew and died for her alone.”

Though the title of this collection comes from the second half of Julie Anspacher’s exclamation in “Spillway”—“I am alien to life, I am lost in still water”—upon reaching its end, I thought of the explanation that precedes this statement: “Horror must include conflict, and I have none.” Perhaps the real model for Barnes’s characters is not the alien but the doll or the puppet jerked along by invisible strings. As Heinrich von Kleist’s interlocutor insists in his essay “On the Marionette Theater,” the marionette has its beauty: “Where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect.” Consciousness disfigures natural harmony; the loss of innocence is simultaneously the loss of grace in both its senses. It returns only when knowledge has passed through the world of the infinite, and so “appears to best advantage in that human bodily structure that has no consciousness at all––or has infinite consciousness––that is, in the mechanical puppet, or in the God.” Perhaps even more important for thinking about Barnes’s strange fictions, however, is Kleist’s earlier, more mundane observation that “puppets have the advantage of being for all practical purposes weightless. They are not afflicted with the inertia of matter, the property most resistant to dance. The force which raises them into the air is greater than the one which draws them to the ground.” Because of this, they can sometimes feel insubstantial. But for the same reason, they can show us something strange and bright and beyond the human.