The Wash of the World
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING The Wash of the World By Stanley Edgar Hyman When Djuna Barnes' Nightwood was first published, in 1937, Clifton Fadiman reviewed it with wild enthusiasm in the New Yorker....
...When the little tailor has strangled his rabbit, he stands shaking, "his heart wringing wet...
...and "Dr...
...In a chilling scene they put on pig and ass masks and cruelly maul and abuse their mother and sister...
...That is "A Night Among the Horses," a superb tale of "debased lady, debased ostler, on the wings of vertigo," a serious and tragic Lady Chatterley...
...I was left, so to speak, holding the bag of Fadiman's former opinion, and I think my sense that book reviewers speak with something less than divine omniscience dates from that event...
...They cluster around the young girl Robin Vote: Nora Flood and Jenny Petherbridge, who in their different fashions love her...
...I was doing well enough,' the doctor tells Nora bitterly, "until you kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes...
...Go Down, Matthew" is a chapter title, and it is at once a homosexual joke, a call to prayer, and a command to descend into Inferno...
...the painting and the bed ran together in encounter, the huge rumps of the stallions reined into the pillows...
...If one gave birth to a heart on a plate," the doctor says, "it would say 'Love' and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog...
...The writers who have copied Djuna Barnes—Truman Capote, William Goyen, and so many others—have her surface without her depths...
...The key image is of the agonized heart...
...The other things in The Selected Works are not of its caliber...
...Jenny, the birdlike little woman who steals Robin from Nora, a looter of the emotional lives of others, is a masterful creation...
...Sometimes he speaks in the voice of Mad Tom in Lear: "Ho, nocturnal hag whimpering on the thorn, rot in the grist, mildew in the corn...
...The doctor is the mad tormented Dante of our sexual underworld, and his last words in the book are: "Now nothing, but wrath and weeping...
...Felix devotes all his life to the sickly and mentally deficient child, "an addict to death,' that Robin produced to mark their brief marriage...
...At other times the language is spare and eloquent, as in Augusta's apology for not weeping: It's not I wouldn't, it is that I cannot...
...O'Connor can Miss Barnes grant absolution...
...It is patently intended as symbolic, introduced with a coy Cautionary Note advising the reader that "this play is more than merely literal...
...In the years since the '30s we have had nothing to equal those two great cries of pain, in their combination of emotional power and formal artistry...
...In a retrospective column at the end of the year, as I recall, Fadiman retracted— he had thought less of Nightwood on second reading...
...Titus was genuinely evil, killing a dog in his wife's arms, raping Miranda at 16...
...The mined mansion, with its tumbled wall and paneless windows, is obviously the modern world, and Augusta's dead husband Titus, an open polygamist (like Wendell Ryder in Miss Barnes' 1928 comic novel Ryder), seems to be the author having a go at God the Father...
...Felix and his son Guido extend the book beyond the torments of homosexuals to make it a powerful lament for all the maimed, the suffering, the insulted and injured...
...Laughter, Miss Barnes says, is "the second husk into which the shucked man crawls...
...The doctor, who appeared earlier as a minor character in Ryder, dominates this book with the brilliance of his speech and the weight of his personality...
...With his mad vision of himself as Christ's younger brother, the doctor is a spurious priest who can hear confessions but lacks the power to grant absolution...
...Eliot's statement that Shakespeare and Milton make blank verse impossible for the playwright in our time has become a commonplace of criticism...
...This remarkable work shows the family reunion of Augusta Burley Hobbs and her four grown children in the ruined Burley mansion in England at the start of World War II...
...Augusta herself is insanely selfish, snatching Miranda's clothing and finery, answering her recollections of the paternal rape with "I don't care what you've done, I forgive me," and eventually killing Miranda and herself, to shouts of "You are to blame, to blame, you are to blame...
...At the end of the play they are revealed to have come back to Burley to murder Augusta, and they flee...
...His account of the Tuppeny Uprights, the numb old prostitutes under London Bridge, is nightmarish...
...His comic monologue on the gourmandise of male homosexuality, produced in an effort to stop Nora's crying, is simultaneously funny and awful...
...Felix Volkbein, a Jew and spurious baron who was briefly married to her...
...Reminiscences of Shakespeare are everywhere, along with Miltonic catalogues and even touches of Dylan Thomas...
...My natural showers have wept unnatural moons: I'm grinned away, to catch my sons' attention...
...It has now been republished in The Selected Works of Djuna Barnes (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 366 pp., $5.95), I have reread it, and it is just as great as I remembered, or as Fadiman ever said...
...The only omission I regret is "Nigger," that devastating squint at Southern race relations...
...The end is not an adequate catharsis for the pity and terror that the book evokes...
...Nine of the 16 stories that Miss Barnes has published in earlier volumes are included, as a collection entitled Spillway...
...The waiting room was empty, dark and damp, like an acre-risen from the sea...
...The third item in The Selected Works is a three-act verse drama, The Antiphon, first published in 1958, after 20 years of silence...
...Otherwise the stories are a good representation...
...The other characters, fine as they are, cannot rival his vitality...
...A woman with an idiot child takes to her bed and joins it in idiocy...
...His dear weight to bruit my case in alt...
...His description of the Lesbians kneeling in the toilets at night, alternately cursing their lovers and their genitals in a terrible curse, is bloodcurdling...
...All of the book, in fact, is what the doctor says he takes in, the "little light laundry known as the Wash of the World...
...At the curtain, the third son, Jeremy, who has brought Miranda back and provoked the violence, leaves the stage "with what appears to be indifference...
...Some of Miss Barnes profundities are pseudo-profundities, and her rhetoric occasionally falls into bathos...
...I never quite dared reread it, though, lest I share Fadiman's fate...
...Robin herself is innocent and promiscuous, playing at home with toys and marbles or drinking herself into a stupor in the streets, until at the end of the book she suddenly collapses into madness and becomes a dog frisking with Nora's dog...
...Apparently no one ever told Miss Barnes, and she almost brings it oft...
...In Nightwood, at least, she produced a masterpiece...
...Nora sees the doctor lying in his dirty bed, wearing a woman's nightgown and a blonde curly wig, surrounded by rusty, broken instruments and empty perfume bottles...
...a gentle tailor strangles a rabbit to please his fiancée...
...a woman's bony knees under a skirt are "two sharp points, like the corners of a candy box...
...no more than Dr...
...The commonest tone is of scarcely controlled hysteria: "I tried to put my arms around her, but she struck them down crying 'Silence!'" The events are gothic and melodramatic...
...On the strength of that review, this college freshman promptly read the book and agreed that it was one of the great novels of our time...
...And I ripped public for the scapegoat run...
...In the quarter of a century since, I have told anyone who would listen (including my students, who have to listen) that Nightwood is a marvelous book...
...The key chapter, "Watchman, What of the Night?," in which Nora appears in the doctor's sordid room at three in the morning to question him about the night world into which Robin has disappeared, is at once a classic of modern rhetoric and a scene of shattering poignancy...
...Moydia, in "The Grande Malade," wears a tight bodice on which, "just between the breasts, was embroidered, in very fine twist, a slain lamb...
...Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them," he tells Nora...
...His sons Dudley and Elisha, if more cowardly, are equally evil...
...His dream is of babies and knitting in a pretty cottage, and as he tells Nora of his life of haunting urinals to pick up men, he draws out her own confession and is able somewhat to console her...
...Some of the images and metaphors are poetic in the best sense: "A great war painting hung over the bed...
...Nora, "an early Christian" by temperament, is so "rotten to the bone for love of Robin" that she says that at the Resurrection she will recognize only her...
...When we cannot see the suffering human heart, it is hidden under some protective covering...
...The doctor's eloquence is more Elizabethan than anything in The Antiphon...
...Matthew O'Connor, a Catholic homosexual and unlicensed practitioner who brings them all together and shares their confidences...
...NiGHTWOOD is the interplay of a group of people, almost all of them homosexual, in Paris in the 1920s...
...The blank verse lines are almost all end-stopped, and Miss Barnes breaks the monotony with many shorter lines of one, two or three feet...
...Nightwood is not a fully achieved tragedy like Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, but Miss Lonelyhearts is the only comparable work of our time...
...Of himself: "You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pât...
...Only one of the stories, however, seems to me successful as a whole...
...It would be hard to find a more unattractive family...
...you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher...
...The nasty family relations, too, appear to be offered as representative, and the daughter, Miranda, generalizes to her mother: "Every mother, in extortion for her milk—/With the keyhole iris of the cat—draws blood...
...When her fiancé dies suddenly, Moydia becomes "tragique," and her sister comments, as the point of the story, "She sugars her tea from far too great a height...
...The language of The Antiphon is sometimes extraordinarily obscure: "It's true the webbed commune/ Trawls up a wrack one term was absolute...
...A few touches are beautifully effective...
Vol. 45 • April 1962 • No. 8
