ABSTRACT
I never make personal statements about myself or others ... much to the annoyance of the thesis writer, and so on. (Djuna Barnes)1
Looking for the True Bohemia
T.S. Eliot, in a desolate letter of 1954, comments on the extreme obscurity of Djuna Barnes’s play The Antiphon, epitomizing what will become a lasting attitude towards her work.2 Barnes has been portrayed as the attractive, mysterious, and sexually daring American expatriate who led the glamorous bohemian life of Greenwich Village and Paris from the mid-1910s to the late 1930s.3 Her figure, impressively clad in a black cape, is a well-known component of nostalgic blackand-white pictures of literary Paris and New York. An eccentric character, she is often said to have created a masterpiece – Nightwood – and to have survived her previous mythical self as a hermit in a studio flat in Greenwich Village until 1982.
