SPATIAL FORM IN MODERN LITERATURE

THE name of Djuna Barnes is not unknown to those readers who followed, with any care, the stream of pamphlets, books, magazines and anthologies that poured forth to en lighten America in the feverish days of literary expatriation. Miss Barnes, it is true, must always have remained a somewhat enigmatic figure even to the most attentive reader. Born in New York State, she spent most of her time abroad in England and France; and the glimpses one catches of her in the memoirs of the period are brief and unrevealing. She appears in The Dial from time to time with a drawing or a poem; she crops up now and again in some anthology of advance-guard writers?the usual agglomeration of people who are later to become famous, or to sink into the melancholy oblivion of frustrated promise. Before the publication of Nightwood} indeed, one might have been in clined to place her name in the latter group. For, while she has a book of short stories and an earlier novel to her credit, neither of them prepares one for the maturity of achievement so con spicuous in every line of her latest work. Of the fantastical quality of her imagination, of the gift for imagery which, as T. S. Eliot has said, gives one a sense of horror and doom akin to Elizabethan tragedy; of the epigrammatic in cisiveness of her phrasing and her penchant, also akin to the *Part I appeared in the April, 1945, issue of The Sewanee Review. It was origi nally planned to publish this essay in two parts; considerations of space have com pelled us to publish it in three.?Editor.