Nightwood – Djuna Barnes (1936) 153 pages

Nightwood was not at all what I was expecting. Having never read Djuna Barnes before I had no preconceptions, and the blurb on the back described it as ‘the lives of Americans and Europeans in Paris in the decadent Roaring Twenties’. Yes please! But that was not the novel I got.

What I did get was very striking, and an intriguing piece of writing. I would describe it as a series of interconnected portraits and musings, very much in the modernist style. The characters are barely more than sketches, the plot is there but almost needn’t be. Instead we have glimpses, shattered shards that belong together but are as much about the gaps between them as trying to piece them all together.

Baron Felix has a background of secrets and lies. He falls in love with Robin and they have a child together, but she is constantly abstracted, given to disappearing for days on end:

“Felix found her presence painful, and yet a happiness. Thinking of her, visualizing her, was an extreme act of the will to recall her after she had gone, however, was as easy as the recollection of a sensation of beauty, without its details.”

Robin begins a long relationship with Nora Flood, an American who holds a salon, apparently based on the author:

“To ‘confess’ to her was an act even more secret than the communication provided by a priest. There was no ignominy in her; she recorded without reproach or accusation, being shorn of self reproach or self-accusation. This drew people to her and frightened them; they could neither insult nor hold anything against her, though it embittered them to have to take back injustice that in her found no foothold. In court she would have been impossible; no one would have been hanged, reproached or forgiven, because no one would have been ‘accused’. The world and its history were to Nora like a ship in a bottle; she herself was outside and unidentified, endlessly embroiled in a preoccupation without a problem.”

They are split up through Robin’s involvement with Jenny Petherbridge:

“She had a fancy for tiny ivory or jade elephants; she said they were luck; she left a trail of tiny elephants wherever she went; and she went hurriedly and gasping.”

Nora becomes the interlocutor for Dr Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor, who likes a drink and to lecture. There are long passages of discourse and the tone, voices and style reminded me at various points of Joyce, Eliot and Brecht. But Nightwood is definitely its own world too, and Barnes voice is strong and individual, and not trying to be anyone else.

I would definitely re-read Nightwood now I feel more prepared for it rather than expecting a more traditional prose novella. It’s one of those pieces with striking images or phrases that stay with you, independent of the story. I have a collection of Barnes short stories in the TBR somewhere and I’m definitely encouraged to dig them out, as I think her style will suit that form really well.

“None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.”