Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

physical copy from the SMU library, finished 05/01/2025

In March of 2024, The Atlantic posted their list of “The Great American Novels” of the last century. They then demanded, “You have to read them.” This is my diary of doing just that.

Nightwood, originally published in 1937, is a brief slip of a novel in which nothing much happens. There are five or six characters, all entangled, most of them falling tragically in love with one another. Another of the characters, a doctor who never pays for his own meals, seems to be in love only with himself. He talks a lot. The lovesick characters go to him for advice (why?) and he proceeds to give them his advice for pages and pages and pages.

This book flew way, way over my head. That could be due to my faults as a reader and/or I could chalk it up to April, always a month of hurry and worry for me, in which I reflect on a year’s worth of teaching college students the art of writing and think, “I guess I did alright?”

Be certain, however, that this is an excellent book because, in his introduction, all-around genius T.S. Eliot makes mention of its “great achievement of style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy” (xxii).

Regarding “the beauty of phrasing,” take this narrative description of Nora, a woman who composes one member of the love quadrangle: “The equilibrium of her nature, savage and refined, gave her bridled skull a look of compassion. She was broad and tall, and though her skin was the skin of a child, there could be seen coming, early in her life, the design that was to be the weather-beaten grain of her face, that wood in the work; the tree coming forward in her, and undocumented record of time (55).

The reader before me actually bracketed this section in pencil, and I wonder why. Certainly, it’s a usual way to describe a person’s looks, but does it actually make sense? Does it need to make sense? Is “gave her bridled skull a look of compassion” beautiful phrasing? What does it mean to have “the skin of a child”? Does it matter what I think?

But then there’s this, many pages later, from “the Baron,” another love-lost soul. While out walking thinks he sees the woman who left him years prior, but then he realizes he was mistaken. “An image,” he states, “is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties” (119). Now that’s pretty cool.

I would like to think I’d have connected more with a book in which everyone’s sad and regretful and having long conversations over dinner while seated at an outdoor cafe in Paris, but that was, unfortunately, not the case.

At this point in my life, I do not want ennui anymore in my stories. I do not want vibes. I want my sadness and regret hard-earned. Lord knows, I do love “horror and doom,” but not the kind found here.

The next novel on the list is East Goes West by Younghill Kang. Because of a major construction project at SMU, this book has been in storage and has to be either dug out or acquired via interlibrary loan. I like the idea of unearthing a possible treasure.

xo,

samantha