Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T01:52:20.406Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Lament for the Left Bank

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Djuna Barnes  and
Aaron Yale Heisler
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 1940 Djuna Barnes, author of the notorious but weak-selling Nightwood (1936), received a commission from Harry A. Bull, editor of the New York-based society magazine Town & Country, to write a short reminiscence of Paris in the 1920s. The Nazi occupation of the erstwhile world capital of the avant-garde gave Town & Country's well-heeled readership reason to be nostalgic for Paris's glamorous recent past. As for Barnes, despite her dwindling book sales, she still had some celebrity—especially among those American readers who remembered her risqué onetime best seller Ryder (1928)—as an artist, journalist, and character of the Paris scene. Struggling with alcoholism and illness, and fiercely private, but desperate for money, she accepted the commission (Herring 242-50). Drawing on material in a notebook she had carried while working as a journalist in the 1920s (Caselli 116), as well as an unpublished 1939 essay, “Farewell Paris,” Barnes took her miniature memoir through several drafts over the course of 1940 and 1941.

Type
Little-Known Documents
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 110 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Barnes, Djuna!. The Book of Repulsive Women and Other Poems. Ed. Loncraine, Rebecca. Manchester: Fyfield, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Barnes, Djuna. Collected Poems, with Notes toward the Memoirs. Ed. Herring, Phillip and Stutman, Osías. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Barnes, Djuna. “Lament for the Left Bank.” Town & Country Dec. 1941: 92+. Print.Google Scholar
Barnes, Djuna. “Work-in-Progress: Rite of Spring,” Grand Street 1.3 (1982): 66. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caselli, Daniela. “Geographies of Loss in Djuna Barnes's Bewildering Corpus.” Transits: The Nomadic Geographies of Anglo-American Modernism. Ed. Cianci, Giovanni, Patey, Caroline, and Sullam, Sara. Bern: Lang, 2010. 103–23. Print.Google Scholar
Gwynne, Erskine. “Lament for the Right Bank.” Town & Country Dec. 1941: 93+. Print.Google Scholar
Herring, Phillip. Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes. New York: Viking, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Weiss, Andrea. Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank. San Francisco: Harper, 1995. Print.Google Scholar

Works Cited by the Editor

Barnes, Djuna. Collected Poems, with Notes toward the Memoirs. Ed. Herring, Phillip and Stutman, Osías. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Barnes, Djuna. “James Joyce: A Portrait of the Man Who Is, at Present, One of the More Significant Figures in Literature.” Vanity Fair Apr. 1922: 65+. Print.Google Scholar
Barnes, Djuna. Ladies Almanack. 1928. Facsim. ed. Normal: Dalkey Archive, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Cocteau, Jean. Le coq et l'arlequin: Notes autour de la musique. Paris: Sirène, 1918. Print.Google Scholar
Cocteau, Jean. Les mariés de la tour Eiffel. Paris: Fayard, 1923. Print. Les œuvres libres 21.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. “London Letter, September 1921.” Dial Oct. 1921: 452–55. Print.Google Scholar
Heisler, Aaron Yale. “Literary Memory and the Moment of Modern Music.” Modernism/Modernity 19.4 (2013): 693–715. Print.Google Scholar
Joyce, James. Ulysses: The 1922 Text. Ed. Johnson, Jeri. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Laver, James. “The Theatre and Jean Cocteau.” Life and Letters Aug. 1928: 201-07. Print.Google Scholar
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Random, 2002. Print.Google Scholar
O'Neal, Hank. “Life Is Painful, Nasty and Short… in My Case It Has Only Been Painful and Nasty”: Djuna Barnes, 1978-1981: An Informal Memoir. New York: Paragon, 1990. Print.Google Scholar
Seabrook, William B. Air Adventure: Paris—Sahara—Timbuctoo. New York: Harcourt, 1933. Print.Google Scholar
Seabrook, William B. Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today. New York: Harcourt, 1940. Print.Google Scholar
Walsh, Stephen. Stravinsky: A Creative Spring—Russia and France, 1882-1934. London: Cape, 2000. Print.Google Scholar