SOURCE: "'Bringing Milkshakes to Bulldogs': The Early Journalism of Djuna Barnes," in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, edited by Mary Lynn Broe, Southern Illinois University Press, 1991, pp. 27-34.

In the following essay, Levine traces how Barnes's early journalism influenced her fiction, especially Nightwood.

Judging by her early career as a journalist, one could say that Djuna Barnes had a taste for "the bawdy, cheap cuts from the beast life," not unlike her character Felix Volkbein of Nightwood, who haunts the dressing rooms of Europe's actresses, acrobats, and sword swallowers (N, II). Barnes combined the public demands of a career with a private fascination for the strange and bizarre. The assignments she drew as a "newspaperman" (her term) during the eight years before she left for Europe in 1920 led her inevitably to the grotesque. Barnes' tabloid journalism is elegant, witty, and surprisingly undated. Because her career...