page_title: Djuna Barnes
section_title: Return to Greenwich Village (1940–1982)
hierarchical_section_title: Djuna Barnes / Life and writing / Return to Greenwich Village (1940–1982)
caption_attribution_description: Photograph of Patchin Place (in Greenwich Village)
context_page_description: Djuna Barnes was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood, a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
  In 1913, Barnes began her career as a freelance journalist and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. By early 1914, Barnes was a highly sought feature reporter, interviewer, and illustrator whose work appeared in the city's leading newspapers and periodicals. Later, Barnes' talent and connections with prominent Greenwich Village bohemians afforded her the opportunity to publish her prose, poems, illustrations, and one-act plays in both avant-garde literary journals and popular magazines, and publish an illustrated volume of poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women.
  In 1921, a lucrative commission with McCall's took Barnes to Paris, where she lived for the next 10 years. In this period she published A Book, a collection of poetry, plays, and short stories, which was later reissued, with the addition of three stories, as A Night Among the Horses, Ladies Almanack, and Ryder.
  During the 1930s, Barnes spent time in England, Paris, New York, and North Africa.
context_section_description: Left with nowhere else to go, Barnes stayed at Thelma Wood's apartment while Wood was out of town, then spent two months on a working ranch in Arizona with Emily Coleman and Coleman's lover Jake Scarborough. She returned to New York and, in September, moved into the small apartment at 5 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village where she would spend the last 41 years of her life. Throughout the 1940s, she continued to drink and wrote virtually nothing. Guggenheim, despite misgivings, provided her with a small stipend, and Coleman, who could ill afford it, sent US$20 per month (about $310 in 2011). In 1943, Barnes was included in Peggy Guggenheim's show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York.
  In 1946, she worked for Henry Holt as a manuscript reader, but her reports were invariably caustic, and she was fired.
  In 1950, realizing that alcoholism had made it impossible for her to function as an artist, Barnes stopped drinking in order to begin work on her verse play The Antiphon. The play drew heavily on her own family history, and the writing was fueled by anger; she said "I wrote The Antiphon with clenched teeth, and I noted that my handwriting was as savage as a dagger." When he read the play, her brother Thurn accused her of wanting "revenge for something long dead and to be forgotten". Barnes, in the margin of his letter, described her motive as "justice", and next to "dead" she inscribed, "not dead".
  After The Antiphon, Barnes returned to writing poetry, which she worked and reworked, producing as many as 500 drafts. She wrote eight hours per day despite a growing list of health problems, including arthritis so severe that she had difficulty even sitting at her typewriter or turning on her desk lamp. Many of these poems never were finalized, and only a few were published in her lifetime.
  During her Patchin Place years, Barnes became a notorious recluse, intensely suspicious of anyone she did not know well. E.E. Cummings, who lived across the street, checked on her periodically by shouting out his window "Are you still alive, Djuna?" Bertha Harris put roses in her mailbox, but never succeeded in meeting her; Carson McCullers camped on her doorstep, but Barnes only called down "Whoever is ringing this bell, please go the hell away." Anaïs Nin was an ardent fan of her work, especially Nightwood. She wrote to Barnes several times, inviting her to participate in a journal on women's writing, but received no reply. Barnes remained contemptuous of Nin and would cross the street to avoid her. Barnes was angry that Nin had named a character Djuna, and when the feminist bookstore Djuna Books opened in Greenwich Village, Barnes called to demand that the name be changed. Barnes had a lifelong affection for poet Marianne Moore since she and Moore were young in the 1920s.
  Although Barnes had other female lovers, in her later years she was known to claim "I am not a lesbian; I just loved Thelma."
  Barnes was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961 and was awarded a senior fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1981.
  Barnes was the last surviving member of the first generation of English-language modernists when she died in her home in New York on June 18, 1982, six days after her 90th birthday.
caption: Patchin Place, where Barnes lived for 42 years
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