comes contempt. For example, during anseminar given in 1972-73, when his lamenwas fixed, he su^ests that his studentsnlook up the etymologies of two words inna particular dictionary “which I delightnin and which, I am sure, none of you evennhave in your libraries.” Later, he draws andiagram and then says, “After what I havenjust put up on the board for you, younmight think that you know it all. Don’tngo too fast.” Given the cryptic nature ofnthe diagram, it’s unlikely that anyone.nA Grad Student’s DelightnAndrew Field: DJuna: The Life andnTimes ofDjuna Barnes; G. P. Putnam’snSons; New York.nby Brian MurraynA he American writer Djuna Barnesndied in the summer of 1982 in New YorknCity at the age of 90. Since 1940, she hadnlived mostly in Greenwich Village, morenor less reclusively. In feet it’s probablynsafe to say that to most of the youngernmantra chanters and bongo players whonwere her neighbors during the 50’s andn60’s, Djuna Barnes was simply a rathernphlegmatic old woman who chainsmokednKools and rarely ventured pastnthe corner grocery store. Few knew thatnback in the 20’s and 30’s she had beennone of the queens of la vie de bohemenand an honest-to-goodness author whosenfirst novel, Ryder {1928), had been describednby a presumably sober critic atnthe Saturday Review as “the most remarkablenbook ever written by a woman.”nActually, Miss Barnes was naturallynhaughty, and she quite liked living likenan unmoneyed Greta Garbo. So she wasnrather annoyed when scores of Englishnprofessors and journalists equippednwith tape recorders and diffident smilesnsuddenly began turning up on her doorstepnin the mid-70’s. Sometimes she wasnDr. Murray teaches English at YoungstonmnState University.noutside of a person who happened tonown Bloch and Von Wartburg’s Dictionary,nwould presume to know anythingnabout it, to say nothing of “it all.”nOne thing is clear from works like thesenby Silverman and Lacan: the modem conjurersnof metaphysical mysteries whonclaim to be helping humankind are nonless secretive than those of past ages,nthose whom the moderns claim arenpartially responsible for our presentnpsychological iUs. Dndownright rude. Andrew Field tells usnthat a Professor James Scott warned himnthat when Barnes greeted her afternoonncallers, she wore a flannel nightdress andna sneer. Wrote Scott to Field: “I stood thenscrutiny of her gaze, her face about anfoot from mine, and removed my glasses.n… I had a fleeting thought, as I took olfnmy glasses, that she might hit me.” Shendidn’t; but she did go on and on in hernrapid and rasping voice about how shenwas “the most famous unknown in thenworld.” Scott left with a headache.nThat Barnes should have become a bitnmore famous in the last years of her lifenisn’t really surprising. As a small butngrowing number of ambitious youngnacademics, hard pressed for fresh andn”publishable” research topics have discovered,nmuch of Barnes’s fiction lendsnitself perfectly to extended exegesis: it isnderivative, murky, and tissued with symbols.nAnd it has been certified as “significant”nby many of the right people—bynAnals Nin, Ned Rorem, and, perhaps mostnimportantly, by John Hawkes, whosengloomy and coolly constructed “fictivenworlds” are now required stops for allnwho would pass through graduate schoolnin English in pursuit of the Ph.D. Hawkesnadmires the “extreme fictive detachment”nthat he finds in Barnes’s “pure and immoral”nwork.nAnd certainly, the life Miss Barnes lednin her youth does make for hot copy.nShe resided in the Village during thennnGreat War years, at a time when MabelnDodge was holding court at her FifthnAvenue salon and Alfred Stieglitz wasnshowing ofl’ Picassos at his gallery nearby.nBarnes knew Dodge and Stieglitz;nshe hobnobbed with Edmund “Bunny”nWilson and the goatish Frank Harris, too.nBack then, Barnes was very much thenshocking New Woman—the protoflappernwho, as Field puts it, “had affairs withnmany men,” but who took care of hernown bills, thank you. Indeed, Barnes madena comfortable living contributing featuresnto the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the NewnYork World, and toj&veral other newspapersnand magazines. As a journalist,nshe interviewed Diamond Jim Brady,nFlorenz Ziegfeld, and Jack Dempsey. Shenwrote Orwellian exposes of the localndown-and-out, and profiled such popularnlocal oddbaUs as Twingeless TwitcheU, andentist who pulled crowds pulling teeth.nShe specialized, however, in what is nowncaUed in the post-Wolfe era “new” journalism.nThus did she allow herself to benforce-fed through a yard of rubber hosenon one occasion, and caressed by a goriUancalled Dinah on another.nIn the early 20’s, Barnes followed thencrowd to the Paris that stiU fescinates—tonthat Paris of Dadaist exhibits, surrealistnmanifestos and cubist baUets: specifically,nto that Left Bank district of Paris whichnthe acerbic Sinclair Lewis once aptly describednas “the perfectly standardizednplace to which standardized rebels fleenfrom the crushing standardization ofnAmerica.” There, over the next 20 years,nBarnes established herself as a habitue ofnsuch celebrated expatriate hangouts asnthe Cafe du Dome and La Rotonde. Therenshe rubbed elbows not only with fellownYankees and literary betters ErnestnHemingway and Ezra Pound, but withnFord Madox Ford and James Joyce—thenwriter she admired, and imitated, thenmost. There, too, she forged alliancesnwith Peggy Guggenheim, RomainenBrooks, and Natalie Clifford Barney: withnmany of those hedonistic “Amazonians”nwho gathered weekly for Pernod andnchitchat at Barney’s posh quarters in thenRue Jacob.niii^HillnMarch 1984n