Douglas Messerli
Djuna Barnes' Roots | ||
The
plays of Djuna Barnes are unquestionably some of the most curious works
of American drama. Combining the realist settings and Irish speech patterns
of the plays of J. M. Synge, an Oscar Wildeian sense of wit, and an often
sentimental portrait of down-and-out New Yorkers, Barnes's earliest plays
are, at best, odd amalgams of styles at war with one another. One must
remember that at the time of the earliest plays The Death of
Life, At the Roots of the Stars, and Maggie of the Saints,
Barnes was 25 years old, and she was clearly seeking models. She
had read Synge; she published an article on his drama in the New York
Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine in the weeks between the publication
of her first three plays. Family members, on the other hand, purportedly
had known Wilde; the family lore was that her great-grandmother had held
regular salons which Wilde attended. Mentions of Wilde's Salomé,
in particular, show up in Barnes's stories and journalistic writings several
times. Accordingly, most of Barnes' early writing for theater, composed
at the same time as the fiction she herself described as juvenilia, must
be understood as experimentations in which she was working out in dramatic
terms the theatrical influences of the day. Rereadings
of her plays, however, reveal far more interesting achievements than this
summary allows. Already in A Passion Play, published in the magazine
Others in 1918, but certainly by the time of Three from the Earth (first
performed by the Provincetown Players in 1919), Barnes had begun to use
a less realistic and more stylized language and action that would lead
her in a direction theatrically much closer to her later work. Three
from the Earth, for example, uses an almost tableau-like setting in
which the three Carson brothers, "peasants of the most obvious type,"
crowded together upon a couch, serve primarily as provocateurs for the
world Kate Morley as she recounts her affair with their father. Until
the final moment of the play, indeed, there is no action: it is all a
dialogue of possession, a war of words between the true inheritors of
the father's love and the woman who has stolen and squandered that love
(she is now engaged to a Supreme Court judge). When the youngest son
possibly the offspring of Kate and his father's union steals
a photograph and a kiss, the subject of the play is actualized, and the
kiss simultaneously becomes a visual emblem of Barnes' theme. Similarly,
in The Dove, one of Barnes' most successful plays of this early
period, we witness a world not unlike Hedda Gabbler's of two intelligent
sisters' intense sexual and imaginative frustration. Like Hedda, these
women keep weapons, knives and pistols, around them as emblems of danger
and excitement, but their primary weapons are their tongues as they wittily
spar with one another and the passive girl living with them, whom they
have nicknamed "The Dove." Through the very fact of her youth,
however, "The Dove" has the only true potential for danger and
excitement and, for that reason, is the central object of their linguistic
abuse and desire. Her retaliation which in Ibsen would have
become the subject of tragedy is treated comically and wholly
symbolically by Barnes, as the young boarder puts a bullet-hole through
their "scandalous" painting of Venetian courtesans. Once again,
Barnes's action, which in this case occurs offstage, brings the battle
of wit into a concretized and static image that completes the play. The
same pattern of linguistic sparring that results in a visual denouement
occurs time and again in these early works: in Kurzy of the Sea
the hero's love for the "unnatural" is transformed into a wholesome
sexual drive as a mermaid, thrown back into the sea, metamorphoses (again
offstage) into a barmaid; the sexual freedom exposed by the castaway couple
in Five Thousand Miles is contradicted by the discovery on their
uninhabited island of an "eggbeater," which belies their isolation
from civilization and symbolizes the result of any proposed union between
them; Gheid Storm's attempt to sexually storm the walls of Helena Hucksteppe's
self-sufficient disinterest in him and other men is visually presented
in To the Dogs by his vaulting through her window sill, and his
failure is realized by his doorway exit. In short, what we see in these
early plays are the roots of the tableaux and emblematic structures of
the great Nightwood and The Antiphon. In
several of these plays, Barnes wipes away all action, and explores instead
the dialogue of wit. In works such as An Irish Triangle, Little
Drops of Rain, Two Ladies Take Tea, Water-Ice, and She
Tells Her Daughter, Barnes returns to the Socratic dialogues, one
of the roots of theater, in order to push away from a naturalist drama
toward a theater in which language, as opposed to setting, character,
or thematic structure, dominates. There is no true response possible to
Shiela O'Hare's recounting of the sexual arrangement between her husband
and the lady (and/or possibly the lady's husband) of the manor house;
Kathleen's bourgeois shock is simply a tool to keep the language and her
story moving. Mitzi's outrage against Lady Lookover's dismissal of her
and her generation in Little Drops of Rain simply spurs the witty
maxims and homilies of the elder. The daughter's innocence in She Tells
Her Daughter is merely a fact around which Madame Deerfont weaves
the tale of her own murderous past. In these plays Barnes has stripped
away action and setting in a manner that would be easily at home on the
stage of Beckett, Albee, or Pinter. As Barnes biographer Andrew Field
has suggested of Barnes' comedy of 1918, Madame Collects Herself,
the play has less to do with influences of the time, particularly those
of her fellow playwrights of the Provincetown group Eugene
O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St. Vincent Millay than
it does with Eugene Ionesco. Unsurprisingly,
few critics of the day could make much sense of the plays of Djuna Barnes.
While they all seemed to recognize something interesting was happening
on stage (or, as Barnes bounded up and down the aisle, offstage), most
reviewers were puzzled by the theatrical experience. Alexander Wolcott
quipped of Three from the Earth, "[The play] is enormously
interesting, and the greatest indoor sport this week is guessing what
it means." Burns Mantle wrote of the same play: "It is probably
the incalculable depth of the playlet that puts it beyond us. It is something
that should be plumbed. But others must do it. We are a rotten plumber."
Only S. J. Kaufman recognized Barnes's talent: "Miss Barnes' play
is so near to being great that we hope that we shall be able to see it
again. And we hope it's printed. ...Even now as we write the power, the
simplicity and withal the incalculable depth of it has us enthralled." Los Angeles, 1995 Reprinted from Djuna Barnes, At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays, Edited with an Introduction by Douglas Messerli. (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995). ©1995 by Douglas Messerli.
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