SOURCE: "Djuna Barnes's Mystery in Morocco: Making the Most of Little," in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 13, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 141-48.

In the following essay, Mailloux uses Barnes's correspondence to reconstruct a significant period in the writer's life.

Djuna Barnes would seem in most ways to be an ideal subject for a biography. First of all, she lived a fascinating life. She did important things, she knew important people, she lived in exotic places. Second, she provided a record of that life, both in her fiction and in her extensive personal correspondence. (It helps too that many of her friends were comparably logocentric.) And third, she presents "problems" to the biographer, questions that are difficult to answer but that also seem extraordinarily suggestive, questions that guarantee new ground to be uncovered and new centers around which to construct a personality. One of Emily Dickinson's poems begins "The Riddle...