by Djuna Barnes
The 1936 novel about a woman named Robin Vote and the four people who cannot stop following her — edited for Faber by T. S. Eliot, who cut about thirteen pages and then wrote the introduction.
A short novel about desire between women, set mostly in Paris in the 1920s. Robin Vote marries a man who wants a son, leaves him, lives with an American woman named Nora Flood, leaves her too, and is followed by all of them into the night. Around the four principals talks Doctor Matthew O'Connor, an unlicensed Irish-American doctor who holds most of the book's speech. Djuna Barnes wrote it out of the end of her own roughly nine-year relationship with the artist Thelma Wood; T. S. Eliot edited it for Faber and Faber, wrote the introduction, and made it famous. The prose is difficult and the pleasure is in the sentences.
Djuna Barnes was an American journalist and illustrator who lived in Paris through the 1920s. For roughly nine years she lived there with Thelma Wood, an artist from St. Louis who worked in silverpoint; the relationship ended, or changed character, by December 1927. Barnes began writing the novel out of it, perhaps as early as that year, and later described the book to her friend Emily Coleman in three words: "my life with Thelma."
It took three versions and most of a decade. She wrote through the summers of 1932 and 1933 at Hayford Hall, the English country house Peggy Guggenheim rented, and dedicated the finished book to Guggenheim and to Guggenheim's lover, the critic John Ferrar Holms. Publishers turned it down again and again. T. R. Smith at Liveright rejected it three times and asked her to write it over; Clifton Fadiman at Simon and Schuster replied in July 1935 that "no standard publishing house could take it." Coleman, who thought parts of it sentimental and the whole thing a structural failure, also thought it a work of genius, and campaigned for it. She edited the typescript hard, persuaded Barnes to fold one character into another and to move the Jenny chapter forward, and in November 1935 sent the book to T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber with a letter arguing that it must be published whatever its faults.
Eliot took it. Faber's worry was the censor: the firm planned an expensive first printing partly to keep the book away from a prosecution. Eliot and his colleague Frank Morley went through the typescript in blue and red pencil and removed about thirteen pages, most of them the doctor's monologues, and softened phrases that touched on sex or religion. Barnes met Eliot in London in June 1936 and told him, by her own account, "I'll take anything from you, Mr. Eliot." She did not take everything: he wanted the last chapter dropped as an anti-climax, and she refused, and by the time he wrote his introduction he had changed his mind and called it essential.
Faber published Nightwood in 1936. Harcourt, Brace brought out the American edition in 1937 with Eliot's introduction attached, which is where most readers still meet it. Sales were small and it was out of print in the United States by 1945, with Harcourt's plates destroyed; James Laughlin of New Directions approached Barnes that July, brought it back the following year, and it has stayed in print since. In 1995 Dalkey Archive Press published the pre-Eliot typescript as Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, edited by Cheryl J. Plumb, so the cuts can now be read alongside the book.
Vienna, 1880. A woman gives birth to a son, names him Felix, and dies within the hour. His father, Guido Volkbein, a Jew of Italian descent who had invented a barony for himself and bought two old portraits to pass off as his parents, was already dead. Felix grows up to keep the invented title, work at the Crédit Lyonnais, bow to strangers who look important, and haunt circuses and theatres where the performers carry titles as false as his own. At a party in Berlin he meets Doctor Matthew O'Connor, an Irish-American who talks without stopping and turns out not to be a licensed doctor, and Nora Flood, an American woman doing advance publicity for a circus.
In Paris the doctor takes Felix to a hotel room where a young American woman has fainted among potted palms and cut flowers. Her name is Robin Vote. Felix courts her, marries her, takes her to Vienna to show her the buildings he loves, and asks her for a son who will honour the past. She has the child, curses through the birth, tells Felix she never wanted him, and walks out.
Robin turns up next with Nora Flood, who met her at a circus in New York and closed her American house to follow her. They buy an apartment in the rue du Cherche-Midi and fill it with circus chairs and church hangings. Then Robin begins going out at night alone, and Nora begins lying awake. Into that arrangement comes Jenny Petherbridge, a widow four times over who furnishes her life with other people's things and takes Robin the way she has taken everything else.
Nora climbs six flights at three in the morning to ask the doctor what the night does to people. She finds him in bed in a woman's nightgown and a wig, and he talks to her until dawn. Felix, in another chapter, takes him to dinner and talks about his son Guido, a frail boy who wants to enter the church. Whatever the question, the doctor answers it at length.
Faber and Faber published it in London with the subject on the surface rather than in code, and priced the first edition high partly to keep the book out of a courtroom.
An unlicensed Irish-American doctor who talks for most of the book and is the character everyone remembers. Eliot cut him back and still wrote that he could not think of a character in the book who had not gone on living in his mind.
Barnes wrote sentences that move by association rather than by event, and refused every publisher who asked her to turn it into a conventional novel. One editor rejected it three times and kept asking her to write it again; she kept sending it out as it was.
The young American woman the whole novel follows: she marries, has a child, leaves, is loved by two women in turn, and never explains herself to anyone.
An Irish-American who calls himself a doctor, has no licence to practise, and does most of the talking in the novel.
An American who ran a house full of poets and beggars, then closed it, followed Robin Vote to Paris, and spent years waiting up for her.
A Viennese-born clerk at a Paris bank, carrying a title his father invented, who marries Robin Vote because he wants a son who will honour the past.
A widow four times over who furnishes her life out of other people's, and takes Robin Vote away from Nora Flood.
1920s
Djuna Barnes lives in Paris with the artist Thelma Wood, for roughly nine years by her editor Cheryl Plumb's count.
1927
The relationship with Wood ends, or changes character, by December. Barnes may have begun the novel this year.
1932–1933
Barnes writes through two summers at Hayford Hall, the English country house rented by Peggy Guggenheim, to whom the book is dedicated with Guggenheim's lover, the critic John Ferrar Holms.
1934
Barnes writes to Emily Coleman in April: "I can't get the book accepted anywhere, it is now at the fifth publisher." In August T. R. Smith at Liveright turns the second version down as well.
23 June 1935
Barnes settles on the title in a letter to Emily Coleman, because it sounds like nightshade — poison, night and forest in one word.
November 1935
Coleman, having edited the typescript hard, sends it to T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber with a letter arguing that whatever its faults it must be published.
January 1936
Eliot tells Coleman he is impressed and that he and another Faber director want to publish, once they have convinced the chairman. By April the worry is the censor, and the plan is an expensive edition to keep the book out of a prosecution.
June 1936
Barnes meets Eliot in London. He and Frank Morley cut about thirteen pages and soften wording around sex and religion; he changes "buggers" to "boys" and she tells Coleman, "Imagine trying to wake Eliot up."
1936
Faber and Faber publish Nightwood in London.
1937
Harcourt, Brace publish the American edition, arranged by Eliot and carrying his introduction — the version most readers still meet.
1945–1946
Out of print in the United States and refused by several houses, the novel is taken up by James Laughlin of New Directions, who keeps it in print.
1995
Dalkey Archive Press publishes Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, edited by Cheryl J. Plumb, printing the typescript as it stood before Eliot's cuts.
James Baldwin's 1956 novel about an American man in Paris who cannot admit what he wants. Written twenty years later, in plain sentences rather than difficult ones, it is the other side of the same subject: a book that puts desire between people of the same sex at the centre and refuses to apologise for it.
Read our take
Anaïs Nin's first book of fiction, published in Paris in 1936, the same year as Nightwood. It is short, dreamlike and written to be read the way a poem is read, and it works the same way Nightwood does: by image rather than by event.
Read our take
Colette's 1932 book of conversations and portraits, largely about desire, including long, unembarrassed passages on women who love women in the Paris of the same decade. Where Barnes writes it as a novel, Colette reports it as a journalist.
Read our take
Gertrude Stein's 1909 book of three stories, the work that showed a generation of writers in Paris that English sentences could be bent out of their ordinary shape and still carry a life. Barnes bent them in a different direction, but Stein had already made the experiment respectable.
Read our takeDjuna Barnes, an American writer, journalist and illustrator who lived in Paris through the 1920s. It was published in 1936 and is the book she is known for.
A young American woman, Robin Vote, and the four people who cannot stop following her: the man she marries, the two women she lives with in turn, and an unlicensed doctor who talks about all of it. It is set mostly in Paris in the 1920s, and the love stories at its centre are between women.
Yes. The sentences are long and associative, the doctor's monologues run for pages, and nothing is explained. The standard paperback runs to about two hundred pages, and most readers take it slowly. T. S. Eliot, who edited it, wrote that only sensibilities trained on poetry could wholly appreciate it.
He did. Eliot was a director at Faber and Faber, took the book on in 1936, and went through the typescript with his colleague Frank Morley. They removed about thirteen pages — mostly the doctor's stories — and softened wording around sex and religion. Eliot also wrote the introduction that has been printed with the book ever since.
Robin Vote is a fictional character, drawn from Thelma Wood, an artist from St. Louis who worked in silverpoint and lived with Djuna Barnes in Paris for roughly nine years. Barnes described the novel in a 1935 letter as "my life with Thelma."
The New Directions paperback, which carries Eliot's 1937 introduction and a preface by Jeanette Winterson, is the standard one. Dalkey Archive's Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, edited by Cheryl J. Plumb in 1995, prints the typescript before Eliot's cuts and is worth having if you want to see what was taken out.
