Word: nightwood
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...become a bit fancy -- the old goldfish tank has disappeared, along with the chessboard -- it is still a neighborhood cafe. It bears its literary traditions lightly. It hardly remembers that Saul Bellow used to drink here, and William Faulkner too, or that Djuna Barnes set several scenes in Nightwood here. In fact, when the proprietor was once asked what she remembered of Barnes, she said she had never heard of her. But the two coupes of icy Pommery tasted grand. Hemingway was right: Paris is much changed, but the moveable feast can still be celebrated...
Djuna Barnes has long been the dark lady of the New Directions anthologies, and in the '30s, when difficult writers were in vogue, her shadowy short novel Nightwood won the loftiest of testimonials. Every earnest Lit. undergraduate read the New Classics edition, with its foreword by T. S. Eliot praising its "great achievement of style, beauty of phrasing, brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy...
...centerpiece of this collection of Djuna Barnes' work, Nightwood still has its moments of beauty and wild wit. The novel's chief strength is a marvelous ranter, "Dr. Matthew-Mighty grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor." He roars on for pages, mocking himself as a wretched transvestite, reviling dead gods and performing feats of verbal wire-walking, all to take a distraught Lesbian's mind off her wandering mate. "Do you know," he says in lyrical exasperation, "what has made me the greatest liar this side of the moon? Telling my stories to people like...
...annoying, calculated imprecisions ("her wide distilling mouth") and somber oboe passages. "No, I don't feel horror," someone says. "Horror must include conflict, and I have none; I am alien to life, I am lost in still water." So, most of the time, is Author Barnes. And even Nightwood suffers from that most irritating offense of difficult writing-the mysterioso effect that hides no mystery, the locked box with nothing...
When Djuna Barnes showed her first oil painting, Portrait of Alice, at Peggy Guggenheim's Manhattan gallery last week, many critics were surprised to find that the woman who wrote Nightwood (1937) could paint with similar distinction. In Nightwood no less magisterial and exacting a critic than T. S, Eliot found "the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy...