When I first read Djuna Barnes’ masterpiece Nightwood, my intrigue and fascination was coupled with bemusement. I did not really understand nor could hope to explain what I had just read. Reading her recently published book of short stories, I Am Alien to Life, allowed me to begin to perceive certain recurring themes. Foremost among the pleasures of reading Barnes is her idiosyncratic use of language. In his introduction to Nightwood, T.S. Eliot praises her “great achievement of style and the beauty of phrasing”, while Merve Emre in her introduction to these stories praises the “strange beauty” of her expressive writing.

In ‘Oscar”, Emma is a twice-married widow raising her teenage son, Oscar. She vacillates between two male suitors, Strausmann, “filled with German lust”, who could “turn the country, with a single gesture, into a brothel”, and Kahn, who has “an odor about him of the rather recent cult of the terribly good”. The terribly good do not have much currency in Djuna’s world. As she writes elsewhere, to be undefiled is a “terrible virtue”. The themes of “Oscar” exemplify those present in these stories of alienation, as their characters, such as Emma and Kahn, cleave to life in a state of melancholy and dire expectancy, longing for meaning and beauty. Emma bemoans her life as she grapples with feelings of hopeless estrangement from an unintelligible world.. “What are we all doing here? I must know, I must know.” She longs for “soul-making” in the sense of Keats. In fact, the essential question in these stories is how one to make one’s mark in the world. What if one’s life has been false, “a little abyss from which I shall crawl, laughing at the evil of my own limitations”? The unexpected conclusion of the story comes as a startling surprise to the reader.

First published in A Book, Boni and Liveright, 1923; collected in I am Alien to Life, edited and with a foreword by Merve Emre, McNally Editions, 2024