Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  Meanwhile, his prestige and fame were growing in Paris, where he was becoming a legendary figure whom everyone assumed was dead. One day, his knee became very inflamed, and that was the beginning of the illness that took him to his grave, a cancer which caused him to be carried, in unspeakable agony, through the African desert and from there to a hospital in Marseilles. He had a leg amputated and could only walk on crutches, buoyed by the hope of being given an artificial limb. But the illness progressed, gradually immobilising arms and legs, “which lay motionless beside his trunk like the dead branches still hanging to a tree, itself not quite yet dead”, to use his biographer Starkie’s vivid simile. He drank poppy tea and regaled the neighbours with distant stories of the past. The day before he died, when he was only half-conscious, he dictated a letter for his sister Isabelle to send to a steamship company: “I am entirely paralysed and so I wish to embark early. Please let me know at what time I should be carried on board.” On 10 November, 1891, he died before he had even reached his thirty-seventh year. He was buried in his hated birthplace, Charleville, with no speeches. When, already very ill, he was asked by an acquaintance about his poetry and about literature, Rimbaud replied with a look of distaste: “What does all that matter now? Screw poetry.” This idea was not new in him, nor was it the product of suffering. Many years before, on the draft copy of A Season in Hell, he had written: “Now I can say that art is nonsense.” Perhaps that is the real reason why he stopped writing.

  Djuna Barnes in Silence

  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. Her silences were both written and verbal. In the Paris of the expatriates, the Paris of between the wars, that of Joyce and Pound and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and another eight hundred thousand would-be bohemians (mainly Americans), there are some who remember her as a constant silent presence at various crowded gatherings, looking around her with an air of shy superiority. Others, though, remember her as one of the most brilliant women of her day, guaranteed to enliven any evening, with a penchant for spot-on imitations of the famous, for impertinent remarks and laughter (a loud, strange, flamboyant laugh, which did not, it seems, last very long: it simply stopped short), for making elegant put-downs and getting tipsy.

  Judging by photos taken at the time, she was not so much pretty as elegant, and this, along with her great height, made her an imposing figure, not in the ordinary sense of being very striking, but in the sense that she provoked respect. She had many affairs with men and women, although there were an even greater number of men and women whose approaches failed for the most varied of reasons, even merely literary ones. The then celebrated critic Edmund Wilson, whom she initially admired, invited her to supper one night in 1921, when she was twenty-nine. Afterwards, he suggested that she should come and live with him and that they should set off at once for Italy as the first and most acceptable step in an intellectual romance. Djuna Barnes may still have been considering this proposal when Wilson began discoursing with wild enthusiasm about the novelist Edith Wharton. And that was his great mistake, because Barnes could not abide Wharton. She may not have dismissed him entirely as a critic, but certainly as a potential lover.

  On other occasions, things were less civilised: we know of a hotel porter in Rue Saint-Sulpice who tried to rape her in her room, and of a drunken journalist who picked a fight with her and her lover Thelma Wood in a café. Someone tried to drag him away; Djuna Barnes, however, had had enough: she followed the journalist out into the street, gave him a piece of her mind and received in return a blow on the chin that floored her. Undaunted, she contributed in no small measure to the drunk being overpowered and soundly beaten. A few months later, the more malicious of the gossip columns reported on how, during an argument, she had saved her male companion “from the tougher waiters”.

  Even in her more mature years she was not free from being besieged, although, by then, her most insistent suitors were women. Two writers younger than her, the now famous Anaïs Nin and Carson McCullers, submitted her—when they were not yet famous—to a real campaign of harassment, one from a distance and one from close to. Nin did so from afar and through literature, by repeatedly including a character called “Djuna” in her work, which irritated and distressed the real Djuna, while McCullers mounted guard for a time outside her apartment. Legend has it that this then unknown young woman would spend hours moaning and sobbing at her front door, begging to be let in. Barnes, however, was unyielding and knew how to preserve her solitude. Despite Nin’s clumsy tributes (she had said of Djuna: “She sees too much, she knows too much, it is intolerable”), Barnes considered her “a little girl lost and a sticky writer” and never deigned to receive her. As for Carson McCullers, whose work she could not possibly have known, she rewarded her with the most impenetrable of silences, apart from one evening when she presumably lost patience with the lonely hunter’s constant ringing on the doorbell and said: “Whoever is ringing this bell, please go the hell away.” The words had a temporary and, who knows, long-term effect, for poor McCullers died years later, though still somewhat prematurely, at the age of fifty.

  Although Djuna Barnes’s childhood and adolescence were strange and confused or confused because they were strange, and we do not know much about them, it may be that she was accustomed from a very young age to strange situations and to being besieged, especially if what people think they half-know is true, which is that at the age of seventeen or eighteen she was “given” by her father and her grandmother (as sometimes happens in the Bible with the daughters of the patriarchs) to a man of fifty-two called Percy Faulkner, the brother of her father’s mistress. This man Faulkner took her to Bridgeport for a brief period, and his surname may, who knows, have had something to do with Djuna’s scant admiration for the novelist William, whom she thought sentimental. It is also true that Faulkner (the novelist) did not admire her much either, at least not officially, since in two of his books he speaks rather reproachfully of her. Many critics, however, have pointed out that Faulkner’s prose style owes not a little to Barnes’s own.

  Other contemporaries, though, praised her openly, from T.S. Eliot, who wrote the introduction to her masterpiece, Nightwood, and was her champion in England, to Dylan Thomas, James Joyce (who never praised anything) and Lawrence Durrell. The latter’s wild enthusiasm (he went so far as to say: “One is glad to be living in the same epoch as Djuna Barnes”) was not enough to save him from being accused of plagiarism by the writer, who detected in a text by Durrell a scene very like one she herself had written. It was probably true, but it was doubtless more an homage than an act of plagiarism. This happened in the 1960s, and she apparently saw such thefts everywhere. Shortly before, in the 1950s, she received Malcolm Lowry in her apartment and he described the visit in a letter. Even though he himself was a complete mess, she seemed to him even more lost: he found her painting some sort of semi-female male demon on the wall; she told him off for the success of Under the Volcano, gave him six bottles of beer to drink one after the other, and confessed her fears about her own novel Nightwood, which she had published sixteen years earlier, but since when, she said, she had written nothing else. Although he had mixed feelings about the book (a technical masterpiece, but also somehow monstrous), Lowry admitted that, all in all, “her or him or It” was an admirable, if terrifying, tragic being, “possessing both integrity and honour”. Lowry clearly left the apartment feeling somewhat confused, or perhaps it was the fault of th
ose generous beers.

  It is hardly surprising that Djuna Barnes should have considered her first name as so unequivocally hers when Anaïs Nin took the liberty of using it, for most of the names in her family seem to have been chosen precisely so that no one else could usurp them. Suffice it to say that among her own siblings and ancestors were the following extravagant examples, which, in many cases, do not even give a clue as to the gender of the person bearing them: Urlan, Niar, Unade, Reon, Hinda, Zadel, Gaybert, Culmer, Kilmeny, Thurn, Zendon, Saxon, Shangar, Wald and Llewellyn. At least the last name is recognised in Wales. Perhaps it is understandable that, on reaching adulthood, some members of the Barnes family adopted banal nicknames like Bud or Charlie. It’s possible that the names owe their origin to some mystery, given that there was a vague tradition of eccentric spiritualism in the family. One of Djuna’s grandfathers even had acolytes, only a few, but one of whom was the great Houdini.

  Djuna Barnes had no children and was married only once, to a fellow called Courtenay Lemon, a marriage that lasted about three years, but only just. Apparently he was an easygoing sort with a slight tendency to be overweight. He drank a lot of gin, was a socialist, wrote dull, cliché-ridden pamphlets and aspired to formulating “a philosophy of criticism” which he never finished. Djuna Barnes had more male lovers than female, but if she had one great love—which is doubtful—it was the sculptress Thelma Wood. They lived together in Paris for a number of years and always attracted attention when they walked along the boulevards: two foreign women, elegant, determined, disdainful, Thelma Wood with her enormous feet which no one, meeting her for the first time, ever failed to notice, especially those who danced with her and had to keep a careful eye on them. Wood was even more cutting than Barnes, and more boastful too: when the Canadian writer John Glassco brazenly admired her body while they were dancing (those giant feet) and asked her bluntly to come to bed with him, adding, “Sorry, I hope I’m not frightening you,” she replied: “Frighten me? No one frightens Thelma Wood.” Perhaps she was one of those strange people who talk about themselves in the third person. Thelma was a drunk and a spendthrift, and, worse still, was in the habit of losing, even before she could spend it, the money she took from Djuna, who, on many nights, had to go out into the streets looking for Thelma, feeling as jealous as she was worried, until she found her at last in some tricky situation and took her back home exhausted.

  Among the men, it is worth highlighting her love affair with Putzi Hanfstaengl, a German who had studied at Harvard and who, twenty years later, became the official jester at the court of Adolf Hitler. Even though Djuna loathed him (Hitler, that is, not Putzi), they remained in touch, and Barnes thus became the first person among the allies to know about the lower abdominal shortcomings of the otherwise immeasurable Führer. A photo survives from 1928 which shows them together (Djuna and Putzi, not Adolf): he is wearing a bowtie, has a large nose and is very cross-eyed; the fact is he looks like a murderer.

  Djuna Barnes’s life lasted ninety years and for far too many of them she either did not want or could not have any lovers and so she had no alternative but to remain silent. Her apartment in New York was her inaccessible refuge. There she received letters and the cheques with which her friend, the multimillionairess Peggy Guggenheim, kept her provided for years, as well as the occasional call from publishers wanting to reprint her few books and with whom she invariably grew indignant. (She got indignant with Henry Miller too, whom she thought was a swine.) Sometimes she would work three or four eight-hour days just to produce two or three lines of verse, and the slightest noise would ruin her concentration for the rest of the day and plunge her into despair. According to one of her biographers, she spent more than fifteen thousand days, that is, more than forty years, in her apartment in Patchin Place. And we know that most of them, days and years, passed in total silence without her exchanging a single word with anyone. Just the noise of the typewriter and those lines still unread. In 1931, long before those forty years began, she had written: “I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further, and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not vanished.”

  No one saw very much of her during this interminable old age. She was afraid of the adolescents who hung around in the streets. She had such a horror of beards that she even phoned a future visitor and demanded that he shave his off (she had enquired about his appearance) before he came to see her. She considered age to be an exercise in interpretation, but she also thought that the old ought to be killed off. “There should be a law,” she said. The law had its way in that apartment on the night of June 18, 1982, six days after its tenant had become a nonagenarian. The few people who visited her before that date spent long hours with her and always ended up with a headache. “I’ve been told that I give everyone I talk to a headache,” she said. The response of the afflicted visitor was: “You’re so intense!” And she said: “Yes, I know.”

  Oscar Wilde After Prison

  ACCORDING TO ALL who met him, the hand that Oscar Wilde proffered by way of greeting was as soft as a cushion, or, rather, as flabby as old plasticine and somewhat greasy, and left one with a sense of having been sullied by shaking it. Others have said that his skin was grubby and bilious and that, when he spoke, he had the unfortunate habit of pinching and tugging at his rather ample double chin. Many people, whether prejudiced or not, found him, at first sight, repellent, but all agree that this feeling vanished as soon as Wilde began to speak, and was replaced by another feeling entirely, one of vague maternalism or open admiration, of unconditional sympathy. Even the Marquess of Queensberry—who would, in the end, cause Wilde to go to prison and to cease writing altogether—succumbed to his personal charm when he encountered him at the Café Royal, where Wilde was lunching with the Marquess’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas, the Marquess having gone there with the intention of removing the latter from Wilde’s pernicious influence. As recounted by Douglas himself—known to his friends as “Bosie”—Queensberry was in the worst possible mood when he arrived, seething with hatred and contempt for Wilde, but within ten minutes “he was eating out of his hand” and the following day he sent a note to his son “Bosie” withdrawing everything he had ever said or written about his friend: “I don’t wonder you are so fond of him,” he said, “he is a wonderful man.”

  It is true, however, that this second impression did not last very long, and before both gentlemen took each other to court—culminating in Wilde’s infamous and unhappy defeat—they had at least one other, far more tense encounter. On this occasion, the Marquess, who has passed into history for setting down the rules for that “sport of gentlemen”, boxing, and for having—possibly—deprived the English public of some of its favourite comedies, turned up at Wilde’s house accompanied by a boxer, who was not only a professional, but a champion to boot. The Marquess himself had been a good amateur lightweight, and was still known at the time as a spirited horseman and mad-keen hunter. In opposition to this rude pair stood Wilde and his diminutive servant, a seventeen-year-old lad who looked like a miniature. There was no need, however, to come to blows. Once the “screaming scarlet Marquess”, as Wilde called him, had said what he had to say regarding his mission to rescue his corrupted son, Wilde rang the bell for his tiny, child-majordomo and told him: “This is the Marquess of Queensberry, the most infamous brute in London. You are never to allow him to enter my house again,” after which he opened the door and ordered the two men to leave. The Marquess obeyed, and it did not even occur to the boxer, who appears to have been both good-hearted and respectful, to intervene i
n a discussion between gentlemen.

  Oscar Wilde was, then, a strong man, despite his apparent softness, which began, according to legend, in his most tender years, when his mother, the Irish activist and poetess Lady Wilde, disappointed at having giving birth to a second son instead of the little girl she had wanted and unable easily to resign herself to this fact, continued to dress Oscar in girlish clothes for far longer than was perhaps advisable. There is another legend about his strength and physical power according to which, when he was a student in Oxford, he received in his rooms the unwanted visit of four louts from Magdalen College who had come from a drunken party and were out to have fun at his expense. To the surprise of the more timorous members of the group, who had stayed behind at the foot of the stairs as spectators, their four burly friends, who had gone up with the intention of destroying the aesthetic garb and Chinese porcelain of that affected son of Ireland, all came tumbling back down the stairs, one after the other.