+ BANQUETS

BANQUETS finally found under Guggenheim's protec- See Symposia. tion enabled Barnes to complete her masterpiece, Nightwood, which was pub- lished with an introduction by T.S. Eliot in BARNES,D JUNA (1892-1981) Londonin 1936.This novel, which focuses around the bizarre figure of the homosex- American novelist, playwright, ual Dr. OIConnor, stands in a class of its and journalist. She was born in Cornwall- own: an incomparable evocation of one on-Hudson, NY, the daughter of a culti- writer's view of Paris and Berlin during the vated Englishwoman and an unsuccessful interwar years. artist. In her twenties she worked in New Barely escaping from Paris at the York City as a journalist and illustrator. start of World War II, Barnes returned to With her tall, dashing figure, she was able New York, where she found a tiny apart- to obtain colorful interviews that sold to major papers, her earnings contributing to ment in Patchin Place in Greenwich Vil- lage. Here she was to live in increasing the support of her impecunious family. The bohemian life of Greenwich Village seclusion for forty years, supported mainly was then at its height, and Barnes had by a tiny allowance from Guggenheim. Although she wrote less and less, Barnes entree into the salon of Mabel Dodge, the "den mother" of the avant-garde. She also did manage to publish a second major became friends with the homosexual art- work, the bitter play Antiphon, in 1958.In her last years a few determined lesbian ist Marsden Hartley; throughout her life, Barnes was to have important gay-male activists and scholars managed to pene- friends. trate her isolation, while the sale of her In New York's milieu of feminist papers to the University of Maryland gave assertion her literary horizons widened, her a financial security that had long eluded and at the end of World War I she went to her. Paris, where shebecame friends with James A link between the avant-garde of Joyce. Supporting herself with her journal- Paris and New York, as well as the worlds ism, she blended with the lesbian and of male and female homosexuality, Barnes homosexual life of what later came to be had a literary voice all her own that will calledthe "Lost Generation,, in the French guarantee her a place in the capital. With Thelma Wood, a sculptress twentieth-century sensibility. from Missouri, Barnes began a stormy af- BIBLIOGRAPHY. Andrew Field, Djuna: fair that lasted until 1931. She also pub- The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes, lished her first serious work, a collection New York: Putnam, 1983. of poems, stories, plays, and drawings, Evelyn Gettone entitledsimply A Book,in 1923. Five years later her Ryder, a bawdy retelling of the history of the Barnes family, appeared BARNEY,NATALIE briefly on the bestseller lists, the only CLIFFORD(1876-1972) approach to popularity she was to enjoy in American writer and patron of her lifetime. Published anonymously, her the arts. Born into a wealthy family of lesbian Ladies Almanack (1928) was Dayton, Ohio, Barney had been to Europe hawked on the streets of Paris by Barnes several times, before she settled in Paris in and others. 1902 at the height of the belle kpoque. By the early thirties her drinking Living a public life, she made her home in and nervous breakdowns had become seri- the Rue Jacob a prominent literary salon ous, and she sought refuge first inTangiers for over a half a century. While this salon and then at the home of Peggy Guggen- attracted many famous men of letters, it heim in England. The security that she was also outstanding as a focus for the 108 .>.+ .:...... BARNFIELD, RICHARD Q international lesbian colony inParis. With Shakespeare. He published his first vol- her affluence, self-assurance, and accom- ume of poetry in 1594, The Affectionate plishments as a writer, Barney provided a Shepherd, a sonnet sequence based on role model for many women, then and Virgil's second eclogue and using as main now. Always candid about her lesbianism, characters an older man in love with a she nonetheless elicited the devotion of younger. The volume was dedicated to such figures as Remy de Gourmont, Gab- Penelope Rich who was Sir Philip Sidney's riele DIAnnunzio, Bernard Berenson, and "Stella" and eventually the mistress of Ezra Pound. Charles Blount, a minor court figure. Her first book, Quelques por- Hudson reads the Ganimede character in traits-sonnets de femmes, was published Barnfield's poems as Blount, but Morris in Paris in 1900. Like most of her works it attacks the suggestion.No further attempts was written in classic French. Influenced have been made to identify historical fig- by Greek literature, Barney was not stylis- ures behind The Affectionate Shepherd. tically an experimental writer. After her The unmistakably homosexual affair with the celebrated courtesan Liane theme in The Affectionate Shepherd poems de Pougy, Barney established a literary may have prompted Barnfield to claim in liaison with the doomed Anglo-French the preface to his next volume (Cynthia, writer of decadent themes, RenCe Vivien 1595) that readers had misinterpreted his (Pauline Tarn), who died in 1909, despite first poems, but the disclaimer is ambigu- Barney's ministrations. Her most long- ous and suggests that Barnfield was in lasting relationship, amounting to a mar- trouble for political reasons, not for the riage, was with the American painter, sexual love portrayed in his poems. Barn- Romaine Brooks. field's sonnets are not graphically sexual Influenced by her friend Pound, and may best be described as "homoerotic," Barney's political opinions became more but they treat more obviously of an emo- conservative in the 1930s. Although she tional infatuation between an older man was partly of Jewish descent, she chose to and a younger than do the sonnets of Barn- spend World War I1 in Italy, where she field's contemporary William Shakespeare. expressed her admiration for Mussolini. Of his "Poems in divers Humours" (1598)) Her outspoken memoir of this period has two were reprinted in the 1599 Passionate not been published. Her luck held up, Pilgrim and wereattributed to Shakespeare however, and she was able to resettle in until the twentieth century. Barnfield her home in Paris without incident. retired from public notice soon after his last book and possibly lived as agentleman BIBLIOGRAPHY. Karla Jay, The farmer. Amazon and the Pare:- Natalie Clifford Barney and Renbe Vivien, Bloomington: BIBLIOGRAPHY. Scott Giantvalley, Indiana University Press, 1988; George "Barnfield, Dray ton, and Marlowe: Wickes, The Amazon of Letters; The Homoeroticism and Homosexuality in Life and Loves of Natalie Barney, Elizabethan Literature," Pacific Coast London: Allen, 1977. Philolow-. 16:2 119811. 9-24; H. H. Hudson, "penelope ~evere'uas Sidney's Stella," Huntington Library I Bulletin (April, 1935), 89-129; Henry BARNFIELD,RICHARD Morris, Richard Barnfield, Colin's (1574-1627) Child, Tallahassee: Florida State English poet. Born in Norbury, University Press, 1963. England, Barnfield graduated from Oxford George Klawitter in 1592. Among his friends were the Eliza- bethan poets Thomas Watson, Michael Drayton, Francis Meres, and possibly