by Douglas Messerli
Djuna Barnes At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays (Los
Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995) [includes plays written and performed from
1916-1923]
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’s 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.
Re-readings
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 of 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’s theme.
Similarly,
in The Dove, one of Barnes’s 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 wits 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, metamorphosizes (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 windowsill, 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’s 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’ 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.”
Kaufman
did get his wish. Three from the Earth was reprinted in A
Little Review and, subsequently, in both Barnes’s A Book and
in its republication as A Night Among the Horses in 1929.
However, none of these plays has been reprinted since until my edition of At
the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays of 1995.
Los Angeles, 1995
Reprinted from Djuna Barnes, At the
Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon
Press, 1995)
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