Patience Scalpel
The one woman in the book who does not desire women, and cannot work out what everybody else is doing. She gets the first chapter and the last word.
To understand it. She says she has tried every method she can name — mathematical, poetical, statistical and reasonable — to get to the core of the distemper, and she keeps asking after she has run out of methods.
The book
At a glance
- The almanac's resident sceptic; assigned to January
- The only woman in the book who wants men, marriage and children
- Compared to a surgical instrument, and separately called divine and ethereal
- Daughters, whom she intends to see married
- A cognac, or her favourite vintage
- Mina Loy · 1882–1966 · London
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freePatience Scalpel is an invented character in Ladies Almanack, the 1928 mock almanac by the American writer Djuna Barnes, and she is the book's odd one out. Every other woman in it desires women. She does not, and she says so continuously, in a voice the book compares to a surgical instrument. She is not a hostile presence — she drinks with the others, arrives at their parties and is fond of them — but she spends the entire year asking what they see in each other and getting no answer she can use.
She is drawn from Mina Loy, the British poet and painter who moved through the same Paris and New York circles as Barnes and was a close friend. Loy was married twice, had children, and was the obvious model in the group for a woman who was in the scene without being of it.
Barnes gives her the opening chapter, which is a structural joke: the almanac begins by handing the microphone to the only person who thinks the subject is incomprehensible, and she is still saying so in October.
How the book draws them
- Introduced by her limitationThe narrator states her qualification for inclusion outright: she belongs to the almanac for one reason only, that from beginning to end, top to bottom, inside and out, she could not understand the women around her or their ways. It is the plainest sentence in the book, and it is about the one woman who is not its subject.
- The voiceBarnes describes it as cutting in its derision as a surgical instrument, which is where her name comes from. It is also called divine and ethereal, and the two descriptions are meant to sit together: she is charming and she draws blood.
- Her diagnosisShe reasons from anatomy. The women all have the same organs and the same monthly tides, so she cannot see what there is to prolong. Her proposed remedy is to sit them on a stack of blotters and hand them a Bible and a bobbin.
- Her daughtersShe ends her first chapter by disclaiming any part in the future of the group, and announcing that whatever the rest of them do, her own daughters are going to marry men. It is the only long-term plan anybody in the book makes.
- Arriving at the tea partyShe bounds in on the middle of a serious discussion, throws off her furs, and asks whether there is a man about the place. Two of the company answer in unison as if a large mouse had run over their shins. She sips a cognac and tells them that without men they would not be half so pleased with things as they are.
- The boastIn August, and only after a good deal of her favourite wine, she works up from a hint to a claim that she could mean as much to a woman as any of them could, despite never having gone into the matter. Dame Musset purrs "Nay! Nay! Nay!" from the furs and asks what she can possibly know about it. Patience answers, "Still and nevertheless!" and the subject is dropped.
- The last two lines of OctoberShe drains her glass and observes that there is not one good hammer-throwing, discus-casting male specimen among the lot of them. Then, after Dame Musset has finished a long lament about being pursued into old age, the chapter closes on her: "Time passes," said Patience. It is the driest line in the book.
Patience Scalpel has no arc and that appears to be the point: she asks the same question in January, March, May, August and October, and the book never answers it. She is not converted, humiliated or proved wrong. She is simply there throughout, unpersuaded, drinking.
Mina Loy's own life did not stay so tidy. She married twice, lost a child, spent years in New York among the Dada circle, and ended up making assemblages out of rubbish collected on the Bowery. Barnes and Mina Loy remained friends long after the Paris years, and Barnes's portrait of her is the most affectionate in the book — the one character allowed to be right about herself.