P.S.
in defense of not getting it
oct | 2024
Most of my time spent reading Djuna Barnes's largely unknown modern classic Nightwood was time spent not wanting to be reading Djuna Barnes's largely unknown modern classic Nightwood. It was definitely not going to be a 'postcard worthy' book. I was definitely going to move on right when I'd finished with a hearty good riddance. I was definitely not going to write a long, winding letter to you all about it...
Decided to write by hand this month. The draft by draft approach from Sept. stuck apparently.
I sometimes struggle with my approach to choosing the book I'll feature on each month's postcard. Do I simply pick the 'best' book (ignoring that I don't really know what that means)? Should I search for the one that compliments/complicates/inspires/challenges the seed of an idea I have for the little story? What if I learned the most as a writer from that month's 'worst' book? If I send out a photograph of my face (or legs) next to a book, is that an implicit recommendation? Can I recommend a book I don't really recommend? Can someone please help me.
Dear faithful readers of my little stories,
I'm writing to tell you about this largely unknown modern classic. It's called Nightwood. TS Eliot adored it. It's by this fascinating woman with this smoky, enigmatic name: Djuna Barnes. Let me tell you all about it...
I had a booth at a local street festival to talk about story | line. A friend asked if I was going to dress like a writer...
I tried to find out who this woman is on the cover to no avail I'm afraid
As always, I read the introduction to the text only at the very end (something I highly suggest you make a habit of as well). I was in this strange state as I flipped back reluctantly to the front of the book: I was intrigued by something I'd intended to dismiss, allured against my will, confused and yet filled with this deep, unyielding comprehension of... something. Did I like Nightwood? No! Yes! I mean, what even was Nightwood?
Frustrated and perturbed and intoxicated (not literally) as I was, Jeanette Winterson's description of the novel struck me with an unexpected force:
'Nightwood is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined.'
Suddenly, I wanted to be 'in' on this magic, high on this drug. I wanted to be pearl-lined. What a lovely image of reading! What a seductive idea to bob around the mind like an olive in a martini glass! I could be one of the cool kids, couldn't I?
The four final options I picked from for the cover. Did I choose the best one? I'm really never sure!
The courtyard from this month's little story (featuring my thumb...)
The problem, of course, comes when lofty language flies (like a common sparrow!) into the hard brick wall (perhaps in Berlin, where they're extra hard) of reality. And the reality for me was that Nightwood was a difficult book, a beautiful bully who was never going to help you up after pushing you to into the mud pretty much from the very first page. She would watch as you struggled to get up. And she would leave you still on your bottom after the very last page.
So what do we do about that? What do we do about the laborious sublime in 2024? We know everything today (it's all a click away!), so what do we do about something that we can't get, especially not in the window of time painstakingly allotted to reading?
More 1920s vibes at a local art exhibition. It was called 'New Realism'
Let's go back a bit: I first heard of Djuna Barnes (1892 - 1982) from a collection of small biographies on literary figures called 'Madame Du Deffand and the Idiots' written by Javier Marías. The relevant section begins like this:
The very long life of Djuna Barnes was not particularly productive, at least in terms of her literature, even though, apart from a period in her youth when she worked as a journalist, it was the activity to which she devoted most of her time -- well, that and maintaining prolonged silences.
For the last forty years of her life, Barnes did not leave her apartment in New York City. She was supported financially by Peggy Guggenheim (who is half the dedication of Nightwood). She would often work all day on a sentence only to throw it away in the end. Of the few visitors she received before her death, Marías writes that Barnes often gave them headaches:
The response of the afflicted visitor was: 'You're so intense!' And she said, 'Yes, I know.'
This little snippet into Barnes's life was more than enough for me to want to check out her work. I like the strange ones. I hardly even glanced at the description of Nightwood, though if you're curious (what, you want to know what the book is about?!), the back of my copy reads:
Nightwood tells the stories of the love-lives of a group of Americans and Europeans in Paris in the 1920s - an exotic, night-time underworld, eccentric, seedy and beautiful. One of the earliest novels to explicitly portray homosexuality, the influence of Djuna Barnes's novel has been, and continues to be, exceptional.
Well, there you go. I think the first line is almost laughable (it gets much closer when it's desperately throwing out adjectives like guessing at a passcode to defuse a bomb). However, I empathize with whatever intern had to write the back copy at Faber. It's tough, this one. Their boss probably wouldn't have accepted: comically sad, and yet startling real people talk to each other in dramatic monologue about doomed love in the shadows of Paris.
You can read me!
And me, too!
I want to try to convey something more of Nightwood if I can: it is a profusion of emotion. It is an embrace of the extravagant. It is language for the sake of language. It is neither means, nor end. It is a very loud woman's scream. It is too crazy to be pretentious. It is Art.
And it is so. hard. to. read.
And me!
The book I was reading in Berlin when *inspiration* hit. I'll tell you my thoughts if you're curious.
I knew the story I wanted to write for October's postcard before I even picked up Nightwood (though it was in the stack beside my bed). It was one of those stories that come to me quite quickly. Many of the details in the story are real: F and I were staying at a friend's place in Berlin while he was away. He was going to do the same in our place in Prague while we were away. I was sitting on his bed. I was watching a video of our friend's new girlfriend sing (though her red hair may be a detail I imagined). I was enamored and my first thought was that I needed to tack back up the posters of botanical drawings that keep falling from the wall in our living room.
I turned to F and said, 'Hey, what about a story where...'
The underlying tension here is my propensity to highly (and probably unhealthily) esteem strangers. I am constantly being introduced to geniuses, supermodels, 'real artists'. Without knowing them a lick, I create for them perfect lives, which, as it so happens, mine can't possibly compare to. I don't know them for Adam (oh, you thought you were done with the Biblical allusions this month?) and yet I know they are happy, healthy, hot humanitarians.
That's where I start: a plot-ish thing, a part-of-me-I-wonder-about-sometimes thing, and Literature.
For Nightwood, I sat down and told myself to really let loose. Be artsy, Sarah! Be ridiculous! Be poetic and referential and stylish! Be difficult, you Eternal, Infernal Goody Two-Shoes, you!
And the result...?
'...across that famously abandoned tarmac (pretty blue sky dotted with little white clouds, little white planes)...'
'God is a camera this time, so you know.'
'Day 5: pick up the botanical illustrations which have fallen from the wall (why must they always fall?)...'
Click to read!
Read on if you believe the Author is Not Dead: I really like how this particular story turned out. And the writing experience was also very pleasurable. It was an unintended freedom, following Barnes rose-petal-lined, thorn-booby-trapped path. If it ended up nonsense: I could plead with you all, But Nightwood is nonsense! (It's not.)
Early on while drafting, I was attracted to this sense of movement: circling, spinning, returning. Sometimes it feels like Barnes's characters are all running madly through the streets of Paris and I wanted that same restlessness. And the theatrics of this singer emerging from the darkness reminded me of one particular late night reveal (though there were many). The theme of Creation wasn't far off the heels of this. [Note: if you're not familiar, here is your homework. Fun!]
It was one of those wonderful little discoveries of writing, because I think it fits perfectly. What am I doing when I raise people up in my mind, but creating? Playing God. A torturous one, as it turns out...
'Can't you be quiet now?' the doctor said. He had come in late one afternoon to find Nora writing a letter. 'Can't you be done now, can't you give up? Now be still, now that you know what the world is about, knowing it's about nothing?'
Nightwood, pg. 112
Day 6: climb the ladder, scale the heights, reassemble Paradise, don't cry when you find -- no, you knew! -- don't cry when you find heaven is spinning, too.
Me, Oct. postcard...
I think it's time we return to the heart-of-the-matter: can I recommend Nightwood? No. No, I cannot. If I haven't said it enough already, it is a challenging read. It is heavy with allusion, references of every kind, big words and complicated sentence structures. For the average reader and well-versed reader alike, much of it will be like knocking your head against a wall. (I was going to give the page count to drive my point home till I realized it is less than 150 pages long! It does not feel 150 pages long.)
Put simply there are more than enough novels in the world for a lifetime of rewarding and pleasurable reading. Nightwood, at the end of the rather sad day, can be admired from afar...
That leaves everything said, except for the one thing that needs said: the reason why I picked for inspiration a book I wouldn't recommend. But how can I say without dying of embarrassment that I picked it as a strange sort of self-defense? That I've been struck lately with the suspicion that I write things no one understands and my answer to that is write something no one understands. That I worry I am giving my readers headaches instead of joy, confusion instead of insight, a wall instead of a door and Djuna Barnes and her largely unknown modern classic Nightwood proved to be the perfect scapegoat for another month of the same... sigh.
If you'll allow me a few more sentences of cowardice, I'd like to hide behind the lovely, 'real artist' Djuna Barnes to say only this: do not fear not 'getting it'. In a world where we understand all too clearly ugly, simple truths, we should not shy away from struggling to comprehend the beautiful, complex ones. Or put differently, 'getting it' isn't always the point.
As Jeanette Winterson writes on in her empathetic introduction:
The private dialogue of reading is an old-fashioned confessional, and better for it. What you admit here, what the book admits to you, is between you both and left there. Nightwood is a place where much can be said -- and left unsaid.
I hope this month's little story leaves you, if not pearl-lined, perhaps simply a little more prepared to be when the right moment, book or song or film or sunset, comes along.
Till next month,
Sarah
P.S.S.: If you're not a subscriber yet, hi! As the board says, I'm Sarah. Thanks for being here :) Let me send you a postcard on me. Just sign up here and use code NIGHTWOOD for your first one for free.
When left to my own devices...