{review} i could never be lonely without a husband

Djuna Barnes I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes (Virago 1987)

"Well, let's stop it."
"We can't, not yet; I have at least three pages more to fill."
"Have you been making notes?"
"I don't have to. My memory always makes a paragraph out of a note automatically." ['The Confessions of Helen Westley']

This is an extraordinary book. 

I wanted to read more of Djuna Barnes' writing after I read Nightwood (1936) {REVIEW}, and I was very pleased to stumble across this Virago [the book, not Barnes!] in a second-hand bookshop. In theory, this volume collects some of Barnes' interviews with celebrities in a variety of predominantly New York magazines and newspapers from 1913 to 1931. In practice, this volume is very much about Barnes herself, by herself. I initially wondered if this impression was because I had heard of so few of these once famous people she interviewed - boxers, nightclub singers, evangelists, stage actors, Russian dancers, film producers, - and so I had only Barnes' voice to cling to in these little pieces. But, no, I think it is about Barnes in the end.

The editor of the volume suggests that Barnes almost certainly tidied up her interviewees' impressive bon-mots: "Sometimes I regret I was not a Roman. They had such a lot of time and baths." ['Diamond Jim Brady'] She also apparently didn't take many notes.

The interviews are witty (veering not infrequently into that dangerous Aristotelian region of 'wit' as 'educated insolence': thus someone has "a laugh like a submerged French pastry shop"), racy, incredibly broad in scope (ranging from the Great War to lingerie in a space of sentences) and very, very smart. She has a wonderful ear for both the absurd and the truly melancholy.

I could never be lonely without a husband, but without my trinkets, my golden gods, I could find abysmal gloom. [Lillian Russell in 'I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband, Says Lillian Russell']

Well, unless you are a master at suicide, can do it nicely without messing the furniture up or spoiling your collar, I should say no, because at some time a chance to be great comes to us all. Even if it is at the last moment, one still has a chance to change his will or say something in Latin, Latin being the language of those about to cross the river. [Irvin Cobb in 'Irvin Cobb Boasts He Is Still Just a Country Boy']

She is capable of completely subverting the form of an interview (so 'Lou Tellegen on Morals and Things' is written in the form of a play!). I would not like to be on the receiving end of a Barnes' interview: "With hands outspread in hope of collecting profit, I came into the presence of Wilson Mizner, and therein he threw the tinsel of his wit" ['Wilson Mizner - of Forty-fourth Street'; ouch]. She is occasionally openly hostile ['The Tireless Rachel Crothers'], sometimes openly jealous of others' success ['Donald Ogden Stewart Confides the Secret of Worldly Success'], and she possesses a rapier sharp eye and a dogged determination to dig in deep. How many interviewers could get away with writing that their subject "droned on" [on 'Mother' Jones in 'I'm Plain Mary Jones of the U.S.A.']! Or this:

"Really, Djuna, you are sort of clever, aren't you?"
"I am only a little less conceited than you yourself, Helen." ['The Confessions of Helen Westley']

Djuna Barnes

It often seems as though it is Barnes' own persona being crafted through these interviews as much as her subjects'. Her pronunciations tend towards the obscurely oracular (which can be irritating): "Her silences are organic bickering; when she does not speak she is profoundly articulate." [on 'Mother' Jones, again].

Someone has told me that I have a peculiar habit of noticing mouths. I have, and when I see one that does not merge into the rest of the face, I want the world to know about it, a mouth that is a personality upon a person. [in 'Alfred Stieglitz on Life and Pictures: One Must Bleed His Own Blood' {incidentally, there is a most interesting article on Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe in the NYRB here}

As contemporary documents of an era, they contain interesting material: for instance, there is the stage actor who reflects on the new world of cinema and offers thoughts on the new art as a means of conferring immortality ['John Bunny']; or the black actors of the controversial The Green Pastures Broadway hit. Many of Barnes' subjects were exiles from a Europe at war or Russia in revolution - trying to establish themselves in America away from their loved ones. Many have seen or experiences extremes of brutality. Barnes is undoubtedly attracted to survivors. There is a lot of abrasive rubbing of the old vs. the new as these exiled cosmopolitans encounter the [from their perspective] limited cultural fora of the New World. There are interviews with a couple of super-stars (from our perspective) - James Joyce (the writer of greatest importance to Barnes' style) and Coco Chanel. The book ends with a lovely Coco-ism: "Personally, nothing amuses me after twelve o'clock at night!" ['Nothing Amuses Coco Chanel After Midnight', 1931]. 

Rating: a collection of interviews more interesting because of the interviewer than the subjects! Most of the pieces also have a very free drawing by Barnes of her subject. I wish the editor had included full publication details. 7/10 (too many boxers).

If you liked this: Nightwood?! Maybe some Fitzgerald jazz age short stories?

{weekend words}

From a letter drafted to Zelda Fitzgerald by F. Scott F.:

'You were going crazy and calling it genius,' he wrote, 'I was going to ruin and calling it anything that came to hand'.

Quoted by Justine Picardie (2005) in

My Mother's Wedding Dress: 

The Life and Afterlife of Clothes 

{review} the pat hobby stories

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Pat Hobby Stories

 

My favourite F. Scott Fitzgerald anecdote is that recorded in Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast where EH has to reassure FSF about the size of FSF's penis (it's quoted here).

I was reminded of the anecdote while reading The Pat Hobby Stories because it is sometimes suggested that they too offer an insight into FSF the man. My edition (Penguin 1962) aids this impression with a most interesting introduction by FSF's publisher/editor at Esquire magazine, Arnold Gingrich, in which he details the conditions under which many of the Pat Hobby stories were produced for the magazine in 1939-40. FSF was a hard taskmaster on those who represented him and rarely considered that he was getting a good deal. His attitude towards his representatives is an eye-opener, as he plays the supportive (and happy to pay up-front) Esquire off against other publications. As Gingrich notes, FSF was "[a]lways most abusive to those who treated him best, though endlessly forebearing to those who treated him badly...". He was also a terror with proofs and changes and continually intervened regarding the order in which the stories were to appear [posthumously] in Esquire (1940-41).

However it is FSF's 'day job' while he was writing the Pat Hobby series which provides the most food for thought. Both FSF and his hero Pat Hobby were script-writers chained to a Hollywood studio system which seemed to regard writers as little more than troublesome hacks. 

FSF had not a few problems himself with the studio system, and one might assume a level of verism in the details, despite the seemingly fantastic troubles in which Pat Hobby finds himself. Pat Hobby is not a likeable character. He is an alcoholic, alimony-shirking multi-divorced gambling womaniser who lives in Hollywood where he is a mostly out-of-work script-writer scrounging to get any work from a studio which has moved on without him. 

Pat was forty-nine. He was a writer but he had never written much, nor even read all the 'originals' he worked from, because it made his head bang to read much. But the good old silent days you got somebody's plot and a smart secretary and gulped benzedrine 'structure' at her six or eight hours every week. The director took care of the gags. After talkies came he always teamed up with some man who wrote dialogue. Some young man who liked to work. (from 'A Man in the Way')

When Pat Hobby does manage to call in a favour or inveigle a sucker into giving him some work then catastrophe always ensues. The Pat Hobby stories are wickedly funny with an almost slap-stick element in their presentation of the amoral hero's constant battle to get himself back on the studio payroll against all odds. A very enjoyable read.

 

Rating: 7/10.

If you liked this… I loved Fitzgerald's collection of stories in Bernice Bobs Her Hair. To get in the mood, listen to either Bessie Smith's 'Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine' or Madeleine Peyroux's 'Was I?' ['Was I drunk? Was he handsome? And did momma give me hell?'].