The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Collected Stories by Djuna Barnes
Miriam Fuchs

Collected Stories by Djuna Barnes. Ed. Phillip Herring. Sun & Moon, 1996. 488 pp. $24.95.

In 1982, the year that Djuna Barnes died, Sun & Moon Press collected her early short fiction in Smoke and Other Early Stories. It published Barnes’s theatrical interviews in Interviews (1985), her journalism pieces in New York (1989), and (in 1995) At the Root of the Stars: The Short Plays. Its most recent volume, Collected Stories, draws into one compact and comprehensive volume all the stories Barnes is known to have written. Edited and introduced by Phillip Herring, Collected Stories includes the works from Smoke, stories from Spillway, others out of print since the 1920s, and several never printed in book form. It is a timely volume that scholars will find useful as they continue to examine Barnes’s position in twentieth-century literature.

Toward this end, the text on the dust jacket states that these stories will “help to establish [Barnes] as one of the most interesting and vital storytellers of the great period of American literary output after World War I.” With this in mind, readers may be surprised that Herring’s introduction does not adhere to this view or use it other than briefly as a context for discussion. In fact, the introduction seems oddly positioned in its begrudging tone and extremely focused approach as it falls between the sweeping praise in the dust jacket copy and the richness of the stories that follow.

Most of the introduction summarizes selected stories and connects them along a continuum of judgments ranging from weak to better to best or from less puzzling to more puzzling. Whether readers interpret this arrangement as a criticism of Barnes’s prose, an apology for it, or a tribute to its difficulties, they are not likely to find it very useful, and it is hard to read the introduction without thinking that Barnes’s stories either elude Herring or that he dislikes many of them. Whatever the case, his casual judgments pull Barnes’s short fiction canon (over forty stories) out of a historical or cultural context. He cites problems in Barnes’s treatment of race and ethnicity, but he calls these “a function of ignorance rather than mean-spiritedness” and shifts over to a series of plot summaries. These are loosely arranged, often given for their strangeness. “No-Man’s-Mare” is, for example, a “strange early story.” “Cassation” is “one of the stranger, murkier stories.” “Mother,” Herring writes, “is superior to many by Barnes because no murky metaphysical question rises to the surface” although “Dusie,” of “scant literary value,” anticipates Nightwood. Other descriptions are also equivocal. “Indian Summer” is “one of Barnes’s better stories,” “A Night among the Horses” “surely one of her best,” and even though “The Earth,” “The Head of Babylon,” “Smoke,” and “The Terrorists” exhibit “clarity,” this “cannot be said of some later stories.”

Herring has made Barnes’s stories available and convenient, but his equivocations, created by what he seems to omit as well as by what he includes, do not adequately serve Barnes. A final quotation from Emily Coleman, the person who convinced Eliot to publish Nightwood, in writing to Barnes, “You make horror beautiful—it is your greatest gift,” seems inconsistent with the rest of the introduction. Coleman may have thought this, as do many readers, but it would be hard to convince them that Herring believes anything close to it. His recent biography of Barnes and his archival work on Collected Stories represent a commitment to her fiction, but readers should explore these stories for themselves. [Miriam Fuchs]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Collected Stories by Djuna Barnes Miriam Fuchs Collected Stories by Djuna Barnes. Ed. Phillip Herring. Sun & Moon, 1996. 488 pp. $24.95. In 1982, the year that Djuna Barnes died, Sun & Moon Press collected her early short fiction in Smoke and Other Early Stories. It published Barnes’s theatrical interviews in Interviews (1985), her journalism pieces in New York (1989), and (in 1995) At the Root of the Stars: The Short Plays. Its most recent volume, Collected Stories, draws into one compact and comprehensive volume all the stories Barnes is known to have written. Edited and introduced by Phillip Herring, Collected Stories includes the works from Smoke, stories from Spillway, others out of print since the 1920s, and several never printed in book form. It is a timely volume that scholars will find useful as they continue to examine Barnes’s position in twentieth-century literature. Toward this end, the text on the dust jacket states that these stories will “help to establish [Barnes] as one of the most interesting and vital storytellers of the great period of American literary output after World War I.” With this in mind, readers may be surprised that Herring’s introduction does not adhere to this view or use it other than briefly as a context for discussion. In fact, the introduction seems oddly positioned in its begrudging tone and extremely focused approach as it falls between the sweeping praise in the dust jacket copy and the richness of the stories that follow. Most of the introduction summarizes selected stories and connects them along a continuum of judgments ranging from weak to better to best or from less puzzling to more puzzling. Whether readers interpret this arrangement as a criticism of Barnes’s prose, an apology for it, or a tribute to its difficulties, they are not likely to find it very useful, and it is hard to read the introduction without thinking that Barnes’s stories either elude Herring or that he dislikes many of them. Whatever the case, his casual judgments pull Barnes’s short fiction canon (over forty stories) out of a historical or cultural context. He cites problems in Barnes’s treatment of race and ethnicity, but he calls these “a function of ignorance rather than mean-spiritedness” and shifts over to a series of plot summaries. These are loosely arranged, often given for their strangeness. “No-Man’s-Mare” is, for example, a “strange early story.” “Cassation” is “one of the stranger, murkier stories.” “Mother,” Herring writes, “is superior to many by Barnes because no murky metaphysical question rises to the surface” although “Dusie,” of “scant literary value,” anticipates Nightwood. Other descriptions are also equivocal. “Indian Summer” is “one of Barnes’s better stories,” “A Night among the Horses” “surely one of her best,” and even though “The Earth,” “The Head of Babylon,” “Smoke,” and “The Terrorists” exhibit “clarity,” this “cannot be said of some later stories.” Herring has made Barnes’s stories available and convenient, but his equivocations, created by what he seems to omit as well as by what he includes, do not adequately serve Barnes. A final quotation from Emily Coleman, the person who convinced Eliot to publish Nightwood, in writing to Barnes, “You make horror beautiful—it is your greatest gift,” seems inconsistent with the rest of the introduction. Coleman may have thought this, as do many readers, but it would be hard to convince them that Herring believes anything close to it. His recent biography of Barnes and his archival work on Collected Stories represent a commitment to her fiction, but readers should explore these stories for themselves. [Miriam Fuchs]

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