Nora Flood
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.
To be able to hold on to Robin without being the reason she leaves. Sitting with the doctor she puts it in two sentences: "She is myself. What am I to do?"
The book
At a glance
- The woman Robin lives with in Paris, and the doctor's chief listener
- Advance publicity for a circus, whose performers are also her house guests
- An old family house in the American countryside; later an apartment in the rue du Cherche-Midi
- Forty by the time the doctor tells her to rest
- A grandmother she loved, dead, and a father still living — both of them in the same dream
- "Bow Down", "Night Watch", "Watchman, What of the Night?", "Go Down, Matthew" and "The Possessed"
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeNora Flood is one of the two women who love Robin Vote in Nightwood, the 1936 novel by the American writer Djuna Barnes. She is a Westerner, broad and tall, with the plain gaze of somebody who does not judge what she is told. Before the novel begins she keeps what Barnes calls the strangest salon in America: an old family house standing in tangled grass, with its own burial ground and a decaying chapel full of mouldering psalm books, where poets, radicals, beggars, artists and people in love sit around one oak table.
She works in publicity for a circus, which is how she is at a party in Berlin where Felix Volkbein and the doctor are talking, and how she is in the front row at the Denckman circus in New York in the autumn of 1923 when a girl beside her lights a cigarette with shaking hands. That is Robin. Nora closes the American house and they travel to Paris together and buy an apartment in the rue du Cherche-Midi, which they fill with circus chairs, wooden horses off a merry-go-round, chandeliers from the flea market and church hangings from Rome.
Then Robin starts going out at night, and the rest of Nora's part of the book is waiting. She lies awake listening for footsteps in the court. She walks the city avoiding the quarter she knows Robin is in, because the waiters there would see that she has a part in Robin's life. She has the same dream over and over about her grandmother's room. Eventually she climbs six flights at three in the morning to ask Doctor Matthew O'Connor to explain the night to her, and he talks until dawn without answering.
How the book draws them
- The house in AmericaIn the same family two hundred years before it came to her, with its own burial ground and a chapel nobody has used in fifty years. Barnes calls it the "paupers" salon: Catholics, Protestants, radicals, beggars and dabblers in black magic all at one table, and Nora listening with her hand on her dog.
- How she introduces herselfAt the Berlin party she comes over to Felix and the doctor, rests her hands behind her on the table, and asks whether they are really saying what they mean or just talking. Then, flushing: "I am doing advance publicity for the circus; I'm Nora Flood."
- What people do around herConfess. Barnes writes that there was no ignominy in her, that she recorded without reproach or accusation, and that this drew people to her and frightened them, because they could not hold anything against her afterwards.
- The apartmentRobin chose it, in the rue du Cherche-Midi, with a stone fountain figure visible from the long windows. When Robin starts staying out, Nora finds herself moving through the rooms without disturbing anything, in case a rearranged object should make Robin lose the scent of home.
- The nightsShe lies awake beating her pillow without force, gets up, walks, sits down on one of the circus chairs by the long window and begins to cry, "Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!" — repeated, Barnes writes, often enough to have the effect of all words spoken in vain. Some nights she goes out and skirts the café where she knows Robin will be.
- The dreamShe dreams she is at the top of a house, in her grandmother's room, calling down to Robin to come up, and knows in the dream that the room is forbidden and that the floor below is receding as she shouts. The room in the dream is nothing like any room her grandmother lived in, and is saturated with her all the same.
- The visit at three in the morningShe climbs to the doctor's room and finds him in bed in a nightgown and a wig. Her first thought is that children know something they cannot tell, and that they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed. Eliot quoted that line in his introduction as an example of a whole situation concentrated into a phrase.
- What she says about it afterwardsWalking up and down in her own house, still talking to the doctor: "I have been loved," she said, "by something strange, and it has forgotten me."