Nip
One of two sisters who bring Dame Musset the gossip. She works in journalism, cannot let a morsel go, and knows exactly what her sister is going to do next.
The story, even when there is nowhere to publish it. She is described as unable to let a morsel go.
The book
At a glance
- One of the two sisters of the May chapter
- Journalism — on a subject no paper will print
- The sisters claim all of Spain as their torment
- Her sister Tuck
- Janet Flanner · 1892–1978 · Indianapolis, Indiana
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeNip is an invented character in Ladies Almanack, the 1928 mock almanac by the American writer Djuna Barnes, and one half of "the sisters Nip and Tuck", who arrive together in the May chapter with news. Nip is the watcher of the two: she asks the questions, gets Dame Evangeline Musset talking about her past, and provides a running commentary on her sister's love life that is affectionate and completely unsparing.
Nip and Tuck are generally identified with Janet Flanner and Solita Solano, the American journalists who lived together in Paris and who were part of Natalie Clifford Barney's circle. Flanner wrote the "Letter from Paris" for The New Yorker from 1925; the detail that Nip is hard pressed by journalism and cannot print what she hears is the clearest wink in the book.
How the book draws them
- Arriving with informationThe sisters knock at the shutters to report a woman loose in the town, crying in a voice they take for a sister lost, and they deliver it as members of the sect reporting to a superior. Nip supplies the location: last seen in the Bois.
- The journalist who cannot fileBarnes says she is at best a little curious, being hard pressed by journalism, and could not let a morsel go — though she knew well it could be printed nowhere and in no country, because no city has a paper devoted to the undercurrents, or to any real fact whatsoever.
- Prompting the confession"Tell me about it!" is what starts Musset's long account of her own career, and Nip keeps it going with an alarmed "Where!" when Musset says she thinks she has found a night-light at last.
- The verdict on her sisterCatching Tuck sitting too close to the woman they were supposed to be hunting, Nip predicts she will come home riddled as a medlar, and says pleasantly that the girl has a trifle of terrier blood in her and must forever be worrying at every petticoat that ever dangled over a hip.
- Reading her from across the streetShe spots Tuck returning before anyone else does and diagnoses her from her walk — the look of one who has laid waste a barren land, an under lip hanging with a dexterity that has found no thanks — and orders her a sandwich and a dish of tea.
- The closing scoldingShe tells Tuck she would follow the trail of a field mouse, blind with good intentions, and find a ribbon of comfort in the desert; that her fury of willingness leads her into trouble before sundown. Tuck sobs that she knows.