Djuna Barnes remembers what it was like to be young and uncomfortable in the theater

In a recent Guardian blog post David Jays reminds us that “autobiographical writing about theatre is typically a blend of myth and memory.” As testimony he cites the Djuna Barnes memoir included in The American Stage about her days with the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village during the first decades of the twentieth century.

An amateur group of writers and artists, the Players produced some of the first plays of Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, Edna Ferber, Theodore Dreiser—and three one-acts by Barnes. Tickets were only by subscription, with new plays offered every three weeks in a converted stable. It was an experiment ripe for myth-making. As Jays writes:

A fervid modernist, Barnes’s addictive journalism always reads as if she had taken sober fact for an evening of bar-hopping. Her 1929 piece . . . is less an analysis of early Susan Glaspell or Eugene O’Neill, and more an ardent, if humorous, paean to her own youth, turning into myth as she wrote.

But let’s hear Barnes tell it:

Why, in those days we used to sit on the most uncomfortable benches imaginable in that theatre, glad to suffer partial paralysis of the upper leg, and an entire stoppage of the spinal juices, just to hear Ida Rauh come out of the wings and say “Life, bring me a fresh rose.”

We used to sit in groups and recall our earlier and divergent histories. . . So we talked, and so went our separate ways home, there to write, out of that confusion which is biography when it is wedded to fact, confession and fancy in any assembly of friend versus friend and still friends.

Then where was the catch in the blood? When and on what day, or succession of days did we, unknowingly, walk over our own dead line and into the general life of the world which, until then, had been the audience. . . . Our legend was bought and paid for by those who did not live to walk over.

Similar accounts pervade theater history. As Jays concludes, with wary delight:

The bliss of being young, questing and exquisitely miserable colours [Barnes’s] account. It’s an enduring, entrancing current in theatre writing: the detail may be suspect, but the feeling runs true.

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• The famous denizens of Patchin Place: “Are ya still alive, Djuna?”
• Eugene O’Neill and George Jean Nathan: transforming American theater together

Related LOA works: The American Stage: Writing on Theatre from Washing Irving to Tony Kushner (include two pieces by Djuna Barnes); Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (includes Barnes’s 1914 article for The New York Press “Come into the Roof Garden, Maud”)

The famous denizens of Patchin Place: “Are ya still alive, Djuna?”

Patchin Place with Jefferson Market
in background. Photo by
Berenice Abbott (November 24, 1937).

Yesterday, author Emma Straub wrote for the Paris Review blog about her former method of aparment-hunting: searching for locations where influential authors had lived or found inspiration. One of her old homes was the storied Patchin Place in Manhattan, near 10th Street at Sixth Avenue and across from the Jefferson Market Library.

Of the ten row houses, only #4 is still intact as a single-family house, and was e. e. cummings’s home for forty years. . . . My neighbors were an elderly couple who argued on the front steps (one memorable fight centered on the fact that the husband had taken the subway all the way to the airport before realizing he’d left his wife behind) and a woman who watched daytime TV at the loudest volume possible. Slightly more glamorous former residents of Patchin Place included Djuna Barnes, Theodore Dreiser, and Marlon Brando.

Straub’s affectionate and humorous reminiscences call to mind the remarkable chapter on Djuna Barnes in Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village, the American Bohemia, 1910–1960, by the late Ross Wetzsteon. Barnes (most famous for her classic modernist novel, Nightwood) lived as an ornery recluse on Patchin Place for over four decades, until her death in 1982 at the age of 90. Her intimidating reputation was the same with famous visitors and random strangers alike; one often-told story features Carson McCullers bursting into tears when Barnes screamed at her to “go the hell away!” She terrified local business owners; once an unwary store clerk, asking for identification for her check payment, received the shouted response, “Identification? I was a friend of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce!” Weeks would go by, however, when hardly anyone would see her, and her neighbors reported hearing Estlin Cummings (more popularly known as e.e.) yell across the courtyard from the window of his own apartment, “Are ya still alive, Djuna?”

As for Emma Straub, although her best friend moved into the other apartment on the floor of her Patchin Place abode, neither camaraderie nor literary “osmosis” could outweigh “finding a cockroach on your neck in the middle of the night” (not to mention the promising adventure of sharing a place with her new boyfriend). Now she lives in Brooklyn, far away from “streets not already codified in someone else’s language, at least in no publication I’ve found.”

Familial Postscript: This past weekend, Emma’s father, best-selling author Peter Straub, garnered two World Fantasy Awards: a Lifetime Achievement Award and the honors for Best Anthology, for editing the two-volume Library of America collection, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny: From Poe to Now.

Related LOA Volumes: Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (includes Djuna Barnes’s “Come Into the Roof Garden, Maud”)