ABSTRACT
Barnes’s letters and notes sternly disapprove of any biographical approach to the work: they elaborately recount turning down visitors, interviewers, and offers to produce Nightwood as a film1 comment scathingly about biographers and fans,2 and despair about the interest in the life rather than the work.3 ‘Being “immortal”,
1 See Djuna Barnes to Peggy Guggenheim, 31 March 1971. Series II, Box 3, Folder 31. On 12 July 1962 she declines NBC’s offer to take part in the feature ‘The Legacy of the Twenties’ as part of the programme ‘What do you think?’ Series II, Box 7, Folder 28. In the margins of Nicoletta Schmitz Sipos’s article ‘A caccia di Djuna nella jungla di New York’, appeared in Il Sabato, in the ‘Attualità culturale’ section ([18-24 October 1980]: 17-18) with one of the Berenice Abbott’s photographs of her, Barnes writes ‘ABBOT has falsified my eyebrows by inking in thick ones. mine right. I can’t read ITALIAN – so probably much of this report incorrect – A DIGGIN [sic] the bottom of the barrel sort of horrors.’ Series IV, Box 1, Folder 4.
