When Chloë asked me to move in with them at their house on Houghton Avenue, I’d read the novel once for class and thought the story strange and not quite there. I’d never taken classes under Professor Sharer; her classes were always waitlisted. But after I moved into their big house, their constant allusions and references to the book required that I read the book again. It was difficult to reread it a second time, but I got it on my third round. I just fell in awe of Djuna’s achievement. Just how did she pull off such an alchemy of seduction and mystery in such stylistically unconventional and yet formal prose? It’s very ghostlike. It is the language of ghosthood. Echoes are everywhere. It is a book of dark undercurrents that slither deeper than the Seine.
With you, I find myself flailing in the language of haunting. I am forever lost in a city of wet cobblestones and gaslights yearning to pierce the night, the skin of heart. I’m still here, with this Ouija board, waiting for a nudge from you on my planchette.
Do you whisper to yourself in the middle of the night when you think no one is listening? I do.
The music of silences is a symphony on your tongue. Sing to me. One night when I returned from the bathroom, I found you lying on your back with your hands behind your head. “Come and get me,” you said.
With each roam of my hands all over the globe of your belly, I created new maps of desire. I was still a new student of your cartography. It wasn’t lust anymore. The hot iron of lust had simmered, but the flame of coals persisted. I still jacked off over you during the week. I never knew where I was going each time I had sex with you. Each time I rubbed my face across the fur of your belly, I felt renewed. I knew my place in the universe, and it was there with you. You were my sun and my moon, and I was a comet returning time and again.
I never thought of you as worthy of poetry. You said you weren’t a reader, so I never tried to write anything in your honor. Not even a poem. But each day and night when I have those dream conversations with you, I feel more and more like a poet, kicking and yet helpless. I am seeing things I had never seen before.
What was the point of writing a poem if you’d never cared to read?
If I write a poem, it would be to the stars, the nebulae, the galaxies. They had already lived a thousand and one poems, and they did not need to read anyone’s mawkish attempts. They were already masters. That was why they were given a venerated place in the sky.
My sky is so vast and so unpopulated with few stars. Come twinkle, twinkle.
Djuna of the moon, did you forget to dream? You sat in bed and wrote longhand in the comfort of Peggy Guggenheim’s rented Hayford Hall the eeriness of losing Thelma first to drink, and then to that chattering socialite. You wanted her again, but she sailed off to New York with that bitch. She left you, there in the city where she lived with you for eight years, in Paris where the literati and glitterati flitted in and out the sad and happy cafés on the Left Bank. The black cloud of anti-Semitism rising from the east had started to cast a long cape of black; the ominous night of glass windows shattering, the rounding up of Jews and other undesirables, was yet to come.
Djuna of the sun, did you forget to forgive? You dipped your pen in the most acid ink of all. You wrote to avenge the very people who’d hurt you. The polygamist father, a man of many talents and languages but cursed with a talent for never being focused long enough to succeed except at breeding more babies. The rape in your teens, even with your father’s consent. The anger at having to take care of so many children not yours, and the pit-stomach knowledge that you’d never have children. The deep relief in having your one baby aborted, and the slick sickness of using your abortionist Daniel A. Mahoney—who was certainly no physician—as your doctor character in your little tome. What a microphone ear you’d kept to the page! Oh yes, you would aim your poison arrow at Thelma Ellen Wood and Henrietta McCrea Metcalf, the wealthy woman whom you satirized with the novel’s Jenny Petherbridge for collecting people the way she collected things. Their hearts would pump toxins once everyone figured out who Robin and Jenny were. You would outlive them all, and you did.
Djuna of the drink, did you recall the cornhusk of her body when you imbibed another round of liquor? How many bodies had you touched before you met her? The sound of her laughter must’ve struck you like lovebirds twittering together. The days together were woven intricately like trapeze artists spinning and sailing past each other for another relapse on the swing before another twist and turn of bravura. You tossed the baton of your pen up in the air and spun it so many times that no one could believe what they’d read of you. Mystery with a bit of glitter, laced from revenge, has enshrouded your visage. You are the soprano who sings of nights long gone from Paris, in the days when the dollar was strong and the franc very weak, in the days when Gertrude Stein held the upper hand on who was hot and who was not, in the days when you didn’t know what you had until you lost her.
One Halloween my housemates and I wore the strangest costumes, inspired by Nightwood, to a party of mostly literary friends. Chloë dressed up as Nora Flood; Veena, Robin Vote; and I, Matthew O’Connor. Veena did a lot of research into what women would’ve worn in Paris during the 1920s. In the novel, Nora had caught Matthew wearing a dress late at night so it made sense that I’d have to wear a flannel nightgown.
Chloë and Veena had read somewhere that when Djuna and Thelma were together, they made a striking impression by hooking each other’s elbows while wearing capes. Chloë and Veena looked incredible together. We didn’t take a lot of pictures, but the ones we did turned out great. They had one of them blown up and hung above Veena’s desk.
It was very cold out there, so I bundled up underneath my nightgown. I wore a bad wig. My housemates thought I looked just like the doctor in drag. I got a lot of gasps and guffaws when I walked about, and many people thought I was the mother from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. I had to explain who I was, and most people gave me blank looks when I mentioned Nightwood. After a while, I gave up on explaining and said that I had a hormone problem. Everyone chuckled nervously.
The ladies were of course a hit, but nobody understood who their characters were. All they thought was that they were lipstick lesbians from the 1920s.
The wittiest thing I’d said all night? “Lord, you make me feel like an invert.” Only Chloë and Veena broke out laughing.
I couldn’t believe that no one there knew what “invert” meant! I was shocked.
Still, it was great fun. Chloë and Veena are the closest thing I have to a family in this city.
I was thinking about this the other day because you and I have never celebrated a holiday together. Was this by design, just to make it clear that we weren’t a couple?
Djuna learned her craft as a writer from listening to her grandmother who had done a lot of writing on her own, and from writing the interviews she’d done with noteworthy people around New York City. At one point, she made $7,000 a year, a considerable salary considering that new houses were going for a lot less than that in those days. Her first novel, Ryder, was a mishmash of poetry, dreams, fiction, songs, belles-lettres, and parables; it was quite autobiographical in depicting her own childhood with a father who not only lived with his wife but also with his mistress. It was all with his mother’s beaming approval, and therefore scandalous. She wrote whatever she could to make money, and her specialty was “stunt stories.” She became quite famous for a New York World Magazine piece called “How It Feels to be Forcibly Fed.” A lot of British suffragists had died that way in prison, so she decided to do the same thing in order to convey what it was like. Photographs of her being force-fed through one of her nostrils were published.
But when McCall’s asked her to write a travel piece about Paris, she agreed and set sail for Paris in 1921. Her first three weeks in Paris filled her with great trepidation until she began meeting other Americans there. Yet that trip changed her life overnight, and as one might say in the annals of queer lit, the rest is her story.
I never thought of yo
u as grotesque. Yes, different, at first, but never grotesque.
Would you think me odd if I said that your missing foot was the most beautiful thing about you? That it meant you weren’t a god, and that you were indeed mortal like the rest of us? If you had an impenetrable veneer, you now had a crack, an Achilles heel.
You are the smoke that’s never left my tongue.
You’re embedded deep in my taste buds. If I think about what you taste like, it’s gone. But if I don’t think about it, there you are in full flower. You are sweeter than incense.
When I dream of you, my tongue returns to the Garden of Eden.
James, the crow’s feet around your eyes are beautiful. The threads of white and gray in the carpet of black fur on your chest are stunning. The creep of fat just under your arms makes your build more imposing. Am I weird in wanting you just as you are?
Society has a way of making anyone feel grotesque about wanting someone they feel should be considered undesirable or in need of repair. I want the you, as you are, before anyone retouches you.
In 1915, Djuna wrote a chapbook of eight poems and five drawings called The Book of Repulsive Women. They revealed ambivalent feelings about women’s bodies and sexuality, and in later years, Djuna never mentioned the book; disowned it. Too much of an embarrassment, and yet, because she hadn’t registered its copyright, the book was reprinted often without her consent. Then came Ladies Almanack, in which she filled its lines with inside jokes and literary obscurities that only friends of Djuna’s inner lesbian circle with Natalie Clifford Barney would appreciate; she drew images in the style of Elizabethan woodcuts. Critics in later years would argue over it. Was it a satire? An attack?
Then came the first breakup with Thelma Wood in 1927; in that limbo state of mind, Djuna began writing what later became Nightwood. Its title went through a few iterations, most notably Bow Down and The Anatomy of Night. But in the year before it was published, Djuna hit upon its most fitting title, “like night-shade, poison and night and forest, and tough, in the meaty sense.” It was not long until, in a letter to a friend, Djuna was struck by the title in a different way: “Nigh T. Wood—low, thought of it the other day. Very odd.” Then Thelma and Djuna got back together, but when Thelma met Henrietta McCrea Metcalf in 1928 and left for America to be with her not long after, Djuna felt as if she’d died. She went on to date a few men, most notably Charles Henri Ford, a bisexual writer who’d twice proposed marriage to her. But when she realized she would not ever again have a love as great as the one she had with Thelma, she became a ghost fighting to stay alive. She had nothing but art to live for.
The tenor that echoes from the mouth of Dr. Matthew O’Connor is rich and Wagnerian; it seems improbable that anyone could talk the way he does, but Djuna did sit down and took notes when Dan Mahoney, her future abortionist, carried on about this and that. He was a short man, a former dancer and boxer, and full of brilliant wit and opinions when he told story after story, riddled with asides, in dimly-lit bars and cafés. She listened, remembered, and embellished his eloquence, but apparently not too much. He was such a force of loquacious nature as Dr. O’Connor, possibly the most distinctive character in Nightwood, that he threatened to capsize the novel. No matter how she tried to scale him back, tone him down, his presence haunted every other page even when he wasn’t in the room. Dan Mahoney was not easily forgotten; apparently easily recognizable in the book to all who’d met him. According to Charles Henri Ford, he once asked Dan Mahoney what he thought night was after learning that Djuna was writing a chapter about him and the night, and he simply said, “The night is when you realize that you’re all wet.”
I envy anyone who’s had the gumption to live, disappear into the lives of others, only to return not only war-scarred but also wiser with stories only they can tell in their own inimitable voices. Good stories are worth far more than their weight in gold, and those wandering storytellers, especially those disciplined enough to set forth their tales in print, are the true millionaires of any age. I am but a pauper.
After writing Nightwood, Djuna tried to write another book for years. Couldn’t. She tried to love again and again; it never worked out. Finally, she stopped. Her deepening affair with alcoholism was much easier; at least she could taste something sluicing down her throat and deaden her heart at the same time. She became fanatically private when more and more people, having read Nightwood over the years, began showing up at her door in Greenwich Village. Who was the creature who’d written such a mysterious book? A few professed love, and she resisted offers to anthologize her work in lesbian anthologies. The editors of such collections did not understand that she never made the distinction between men and women when she loved: “I’m not a lesbian; I just loved Thelma.”
Thelma made her feel alive in their eight years together, but Thelma leaving her quite abruptly made her immortal.
Open a page anywhere in Nightwood and a ghost will slip out and haunt you without you quite comprehending why. The language of shadow and memory is full of mystery and ache, all rapt and ripe for translators lost without their dictionaries.
With each technological advance online and with our mobile phones, we find ourselves dissociating more and more from each other. We have turned each other into blips on the screen. We say hello to each other online, and we forget what the other looks like in breathing form. We are scarcely there in person when we greet each other on the street. We’ve become too comfortable with feeling what we must in front of the computer screen that in the face of another, we suddenly feel the need for masks. We want to run and hide; no wall of text to shield us from their unchecked reactions to our living selves. We watch porn online and let it narrow our sexual thinking into boxes. Our lives have turned into bits and bytes that we have become ghosts even to ourselves. How did we get so haunted?
Our hearts are full of unsolved mysteries. We read in the dark because the ache for definitive answers to our whys haunts us. We are pages of ashes to ashes.
Djuna lived in a time when you couldn’t always get a copy of anything easily. If she saw a movie that she liked, she couldn’t expect to own a copy of the print one day unless she had her own film projector and the means to buy the print. She had to count otherwise on revival theaters. If she heard a song on the radio, there was no guarantee that she could find the song in the nearest record store. Nothing was instantly downloadable. They had to make do with memory.
Magic and memory go together like bread and butter. Maybe it’s better not to know someone too well.
Nightwood reeks of that elusiveness of memory. Everyone wants Robin, but she doesn’t understand quite why she keeps leaving someone for another, or what should be the source of her happiness, her unhappiness too. Was it only sex or the want of something more real? Was I not real enough for you?
Sometimes I dream of being lost in Paris of the 1920s late at night. Your name is almost a whisper on my lips, but I don’t dare utter it out loud. The winds buffet me everywhere I turn. I don’t know French; the only thing I’m sure of is the word rue, which I suspect means “street.” I am wearing a pair of flimsy pajamas and a silken robe, holding a slender cigarette holder. Somehow I feel as if I’ve been just thrown out of someone’s home. No idea why; maybe it was something I’d said not of malice but got misinterpreted as such. Through the windows of crowded cafés, I see flappers and tuxedoed men laughing and carrying on, all having a good time. I see a reflection of myself in the window. I am frail and shivering, but no one inside ever notices. Maybe they’re used to seeing higher-ups suddenly destitute the next day. Each polished round of cobblestone that I straggle across looks like daubs of paint. The glow of gaslight, heralding passengers from a Hector Guimard–designed Art Nouveau entrance off the Paris Métro, is a halo looking for its angel.
Come to Paris. I’ll find you.
Even though many of Djuna’s friends read Nightwood and tittered among themselves when they figured out who was truly whom, it wasn’t a runaway bestseller. Sh
e ended up having to ask for money from her friend Peggy Guggenheim when she moved into her tiny flat at 5 Patchin Place. There, she tried to write again, but drinking was much easier to do. The forties became a blur. Then she realized sometime in 1950 that she had to make a choice between liquor and art. Being an artist who had demanded impossibly much of herself to the point of drink, she made the more surprising choice. By redoubling her herculean efforts to write—and rewrite—her verse play The Antiphon, she had chosen art, a far more difficult and admirable addiction. Her family was not pleased to see themselves mocked so mercilessly onstage, but she’d stopped caring a long time before.
I’ve tried to read the play. I couldn’t. It’s dense, its language a brick wall. I’m never sure where it’s going at times, and I don’t feel emotionally engaged, but I like to think of it as Djuna’s Finnegans Wake; that is, many people regard James Joyce’s Ulysses as his masterpiece, and his final novel, Finnegans Wake, inscrutably so. The language of The Antiphon, if you stop trying to decode its overall plot in your first read, is dazzling, rich in cadence. Chloë and Veena have read the play a few times, and they “like” it, but only in the way that they’re supposed to like it because scholars and critics have proclaimed it a masterpiece. No matter. If a writer can achieve something as singular and unique as Nightwood in spite of her mostly opaque output, she will always be remembered for the ages. Nightwood is a fevered dream unforgettable for the ages.
The pictures that Chloë and Veena emailed me from Paris depressed me in a way I hadn’t expected. They had read a number of books about the Lost Generation, and the writers and artists who populated the Left Bank during the 1920s. They had done their first Djuna pilgrimage in New York when they got married twelve years before, and now they wanted to visit the many landmarks of the Left Bank.
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