freeing the family
by Douglas Messerli
Djuna Barnes Biography
of Julie von Bartmann (Los Angeles:
Green Integer, 2020)
Written in
Cagnes sur Mer and the Maritimes Alps in France between November 1923 and April
1924, Djuna Barnes’ three-act play, Biography
of Julie van Bartmann, related to several of her early stories—particularly
“A Night Among the Horses”—and to her 1928 fiction Ryder. Like the father, Wendell, of that book, the father of this
early play, Basil Born, refuses to let his children attend public school, and
faces down the school authorities, challenging them with their teaching
methodologies: he wins. And like the early short story, one of Barnes’ best, a
strong and sophisticated woman verbally destroys her “bestial” horse groom,
which ends in his death.
Yet it is hard
even speak of “events’ such as these in Barnes’ work. Unlike most US plays,
which lay out a “story” through their character’s lives are revealed, Barnes’
highly artificed theater is centered in what one might describe as
“revelations,” most long statements about oneself and life, alternating with a
questions or sparring conversations, such as those between the powerful opera
singer Julie van Bartmann and the strong-minded “landholder,” Born. And even
the “revelations” are less revealing of how the characters think than how they
perceive the world morally and philosophically; yet since these statements are
presented in a highly literary language, filled with aphorisms, puns, extended
metaphors, and dualities, we cannot even be sure that the character is speaking
honestly or attempting to play out a desired notion of themselves.
Barnes begins
the play in simple anticipation as Born’s two sons, Gart and Costa (like her
language, Barnes generally stocks her works with strangely named figures—not
unlike her own name and those of brothers) who await the arrival of their
father and a new boarder, Julie, who is apparently staying at the house—the
boys do some farming, but Born seems to have retired—to rest up before she
returns to the stage. Evidently, she is not the first grand person to stay with
them, women who, throughout the years, have had had passionate relations with
their father, even while their mother, now dead, was still living.
Gart, the elder
son, is thin and handsome, a gentle soul who plays the organ well. The younger
son, Costa, is shorter and broader shouldered, a figure described as a kind of
“beast,” having a connection with the soil. The daughter, Gustava, nineteen
years of age, is an excitable young woman who cares for pigeons and garden. All
three are in awe of their dominating father.
The rest of the
drama plays out various encounters between these figures, in which each falls
in love, in some respect, with the grand Julie. The first such “encounter” is
understandably between Basil Born and Julie, and she questions him about
himself, his children, and the house in which she is to stay. These passages,
in particular, have the feel of a tennis match as each of these strong figures
sends out charged and even barbed messages about their temperaments and
sexualities:
julie
I am not
married, that is—not married. I have not money worries.
I love—peculiarity, perhaps you would call it vice (she raises her
eyes watching him). Nothing
astonishes me. In the night, when it
rains, when the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls, I do no not
draw my toes up, I sleep, and leave terror and superstition to the
people.
basil
At a pinch madame, I can be a little peculiar myself.
julie
It begins to
be something of which I am aware. I have heard
that you are
savage. Is it so?
basil
Not at all.
I have a certain influence with my family, but the
state does not
like me.
At this point, he goes on to explain his encounter with
“peoples in places of dictatorship” (i.e. the local school board). But the
passage also clearly suggests Basil’s interest in her, and she in him. The act
ends indeed in a kind a double entendre
as Julie suggests “I am willing you should play a little,” suggesting that she
might hear him play a hymn upon the organ they have their home; but with the
end of that sentence, “but—I am noted for my detours!” hints that the “playing”
and “organ” might mean something else. Basil’s command to his daughter, “Show
that splendor to bed!” makes his desires, if not intentions, quite clear.
But the second
scene of Act I, it is not Basil who visits Julie’s bed, but Gustava, who
snuggles up to Julie before pouring out a biography of the woman as she has
been following her for years in fan magazines. Indeed, perhaps she has been
following the career of the diva, since she is seen in another moment of the
play as cutting out a picture from a magazine, several of which are posted on
the Born walls. The vision she has of the grand lady is almost an inhuman one:
Wait, don’t laugh. It is like this: You were born. You were laid
in a bassinet, you did not cry. You learned to walk before other
children, you watched everything, and then one day, when you
were three or four, you realized that you were terrible, a child
of destiny.
As Julie quickly perceives, Gustava is not quite simple
country girl she appears to be, soon moving even closer to the beautiful woman:
“Let me put my head on your arm, your perfume is so strong, and so sweet—“ And
by the end of their long conversation, she has hinted that Julie must come to
terms with her—and her brothers—with Julie suggesting “I have never reckoned
with children,” and Gustava responding, “Now you have to it, we are here, wat
are you going to do?” Julie sends her away.
The second act
begins with an extended conversation between Gustava and Costa, in which
recounts her morning activities to the girl, both admitting their admiration
for her (“She is beautiful.”). When, soon after, Julie approaches Gart in an
attempt to the seemingly shy twenty-year-old out by describing her own past
selves, Costa ends their conversation by striking his brother, the two of them
violently wrestling, while Julie looks on, clearly recognizing the emotion
chaos she has created in them: “It has begun.”
In the second
scene of Act II, Barnes again creates a strangely ambiguous sexual scene,
wherein Gart, troubled and unable to sleep, crawls into his father’s bed,
querying him about the dazzling visitor in their house (“Is Julie von Bartmann
a good woman?” “Beautiful, damaged, there more beautiful.” Finally moving to
his own perceived condition, “What is passion in man?”)
The father,
strongly demeaning Julie, is quite obviously trying, as he puts it, “trying to
make Gart safe for tragedy.” Nothing, however, can calm the excited young man,
who almost dares his father to kill him (“No, you must finish my life. You have
begun it and you must see it through.”) before he threatens either suicide or
murder: “I have come to something that I do not understand, or only in one way,
I think it would not be your way. …Whether I must kill myself, or you.”
There is only
one way this tragedy can now play out. For the first time in the elder Born’s
life, he has meant less to a woman than his now nearly-grown children. At the
age of 50, time has changed everything. In an attempt to demand she chose him,
what he describes as demanding “victory,” she fends off his invitation to his
bed off, ultimately proclaiming she prefers “the shy, gentle elder son, half
musician, half human.”
By the end of
the play, Born has shot himself, dying before the towering Julie, while Gustav
demands the intrude leave:
Go, go,
it is all over. You see what he has managed—accomplished. Go,
go, take
everything and go. You see yourself—we are reunited—we need
nothing—it is all finished—settled.
Leaving, Julie’s slightly inexplicably reply, “Immense!
Immense!”, seems to suggest she perceives Born’s act as a sort of sacrifice, an
attempt to keep his family as a tightly knit unit opposed to the ridiculousness
of other’s lives. Yet one can only wonder if his act is not also a highly
selfish one, the act of, as he describes himself, the Beast, desperate to hold
onto what he has created and his insufferable pride.
Barnes does not
answer the question, but surely we recognize, at play’s end, the father’s
symbolic death, which closes both his and Julie’s biography, has freed these
isolated orphans to enter the world, to now lead their own lives, if slightly
wary of the foolishness that may face them. And in that sense, Barnes’
theatrical family drama, ends, like Chekhov plays, with a somewhat comedic,
rather than tragic, resolution.
Los Angeles,
January 15, 2010
Reprinted from Reading with My Lips (January 2025).
