DJUNA

Graphic biography of “the most famous unknown of the [20th] century.”

With visual stylings that recall Jazz Age poster art, Macy evokes the life and times of modernist Djuna Barnes, whose social circle was a veritable Rolodex of the Lost Generation. Macy begins in medias res, as Peggy Guggenheim rushes to Barnes’ rescue for the umpteenth time in 1938, “another bad year for Djuna Barnes.” Macy then takes readers back to 1912 and Barnes’ early career as a journalist, at 19 supporting her mother and younger brothers. From there, he goes back even further, to Barnes’ decidedly unusual childhood in an ill-fated utopian commune established by her grandmother to promote free love—and from which she was married off at 17 against her will. Her father, characterized by Macy as “an idiot manchild,” was a talentless artist, but Barnes had talent to spare. Her “special brand of snark” helped her find a home with the literary elite, among whom “Djuna was on a mission to be as experimental an artist as possible.” To give readers a taste of what this means, Macy works quotations of her writing into the dialogue from time to time. These snippets attest to her facility with modernist wordplay; his presentation of an English-language reading of her 1958 play, The Antiphon, reveals her at possibly her most challenging (“What does ‘fornication of the mint’ mean?” wonders an audience member). Barnes’ fiery red hair draws the eye in Macy’s otherwise monochromatic panels, visually underscoring the vitality that made Guggenheim and T.S. Eliot such loyal friends. She was not so lucky with lovers, of whom there were many and of such variety that in her waning years “she became an LGBT icon” (but rejected the label). By the end, readers will understand Macy’s admiration for this woman whose “greatest creation was herself.”

A powerful introduction to a formidable personality.