‘Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes’
By Jon Macy
Street Noise Books, 320 Pages

Jon Macy’s graphic biography of Djuna Barnes, the celebrated novelist of lesbian love most famous for a work that T.S. Eliot championed, “Nightwood,” calls to mind a declaration by Samuel Johnson: “The heroes of literary as well as civil history have been very often no less remarkable for what they have suffered than for what they have achieved.”

Unlike many modernist authors, Barnes did not grow up in a conventional family and community that she then rejected for an avant-garde life in New York, Paris, or some other metropolitan art world. She had to vie for attention and respect in a polygamous rural utopian grouping on Long Island (you could hardly call it a family). In this chaotic atmosphere, with no appreciation or support, it was hard to know where to turn to be herself, which was to be a writer.

One of the great pleasures of a graphic biography is that the subject’s world is pictured on every page, rather than merely glimpsed in the photographs that populate traditional biographies. Mr. Macy’s drawings depict scenes from Barnes’s life for which no photographs exist. 

I won’t soon forget the drawing of her being forcibly fed so that she could experience and report on what suffragettes suffered during hunger strikes. I won’t soon forget Mr. Macy’s drawings of haunting Parisian streets that evoke Barnes’s loneliness and troubling love affairs, or the times when patrons like Peggy Guggenheim came along to rescue Barnes from her misfortunes. 

Near the beginning of Mr. Macy’s biography a page of four panels pictures a 1920s street, a three-quarter profile of Barnes in a 1920s style hat, a shot of her from the back walking away, a figure of “strange sadness” who reminds the biographer of himself, and of her seated alone in a cafe, with the caption: “I had to know everything.”

What is extraordinary about Barnes is how she persisted even when her greatest work did not sell and when a publisher cheated her. T.S. Eliot became crucial: He worked at Faber & Faber and made sure she got published. He is shown at his desk, a figure of great dignity, suggesting the title “Nightwood,” saying, “It gives the lure of darkness, but the strength of the natural world as well.”

One of the endearing aspects of Barnes’s life is how she was not like Ernest Hemingway and others who preened themselves on their importance and were masters at self-promotion. Her integrity appealed to Eliot. She lived into her 80s, writing fitfully but doggedly, winding up in Greenwich Village, where she could have capitalized on her avant-garde fame but resolutely refused to play the game of literary renown.

You will not learn that much about Djuna Barnes’s novels and her other work in this biography, but disregard reviewers who may complain about that and call Mr. Macy’s book a pathography — interested only in her ills. Mr. Macy’s book is about the struggle of an important writer, of what her life was like day-to-day, not what it was like on the page. There are biographies of her that are “literary” if that is what appeals to you.

Mr. Macy joins the ranks of biographers who understand that even when a writer’s work is not dissected, what the writer has to say is implicit in what the writer experienced. W.A. Swanburg’s biography of Theodore Dreiser, for example, contains no literary criticism, but Swanburg, like Mr. Macy, captures his subject’s identity so powerfully that you understand where the writer’s books came from. 

To put it another way, Barnes’s books are there and stand on their own, but her life requires the full and complete attention and depiction that a graphic biography renders with specificity and suggestiveness.

Mr. Macy puts it best: “Djuna Barnes inspired me to keep going with my writing. She is the underdog punk rebel saint of all those who ever wanted to be a star. She never gave up on her dreams, even when she was down and out. People get caught up in the excitement of passionate people and it creates a personal energy field. You share that love, and it feels good when it comes back to you.”

Mr. Rollyson writes about Djuna Barnes in “Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, revised and updated.”