THE BOOK OF REPULSIVE WOMEN

FROM FIFTH AVENUE UP

OMEDAY beneath some hard
 Capricious star—
Spreading its light a little
Over far,
We'll know you for the woman
That you are.

For though one took you, hurled you
Out of space,
With your legs half strangled
In your lace,
You'd lip the world to madness
On your face.

We’d see your body in the grass
With cool pale eyes.
We'd strain to touch those lang'rous
Length of thighs,
And hear your short sharp modern
Babylonic cries.

It wouldn't go. We’d feel you
Coil in fear
Leaning across the fertile
Fields to leer
As you urged some bitter secret
Through the ear.

We see your arms grow humid
In the heat;
We see your damp chemise lie
Pulsing in the beat
Of the over-hearts left oozing
At your feet.

See you sagging down with bulging
Hair to sip,
The dappled damp from some vague
Under lip,
Your soft saliva, loosed
With orgy, drip.

Once we'd not have called this
Woman you—
When leaning above your mothers
Spleen you drew
Your mouth across her breast as
Trick musicians do.

Plunging grandly out to fall
Upon your face.
Naked—female—baby
In grimace,
With your belly bulging stately
Into space.

IN GENERAL

HAT altar cloth, what rag of worth
    Unpriced?
What turn of card, what trick of game
Undiced?
And you we valued still a little
More than Christ.

SEEN FROM THE "L"

O SHE stands—nude—stretching dully
      Two amber combs loll through her hair
A vague molested carpet pitches
Down the dusty length of stair.
She does not see, she does not care
It’s always there.

The frail mosaic on her window
Facing starkly toward the street
Is scribbled there by tipsy sparrows—
Etched there with their rocking feet.
Is fashioned too, by every beat
       Of shirt and sheet.

Sill her clothing is less risky
Than her body in its prime,
They are chain-stitched and so is she
Chain-stitched to her soul for time.
Ravelling grandly into vice
Dropping crooked into rhyme.
Slipping through the stitch of virtue,
       Into crime.

Though her lips are vague as fancy
In her youth—
They bloom vivid and repulsive
As the truth.
Even vases in the making
       Are uncouth.

DRAWINGS BY DJUNA BARNES

IN PARTICULAR

HAT loin-cloth, what rag of wrong
    Unpriced?
What turn of body, what of lust
Undiced?
So we’ve worshipped you a little
More than Christ.

FROM THIRD AVENUE ON

ND now she walks on out turned feet
        Beside the litter in the street
Or rolls beneath a dirty sheet
       Within the town.
She does not stir to doff her dress,
She does not kneel low to confess,
A little conscience, no distress
       And settled down.

Ah God! she settles down we say;
It means her powers slip away
It means she draws back. day by day
       From good or bad.
And so she looks upon the floor
Or listens at an open door
Or lies her down, upturned to snore
       Both loud and sad.

Or sits besides the chinaware,
Sits mouthing meekly in a chair,
With over-curled, hard waving hair
       Above her eyes.
Or grins too vacant into space—
A vacant space is in her face—
Where nothing came to take the place
       Of high hard cries.

Or yet we hear her on the stairs
With some few elements of prayers,
Until she breaks it off and swears
       A loved bad word.
Somewhere beneath her hurried curse,
A corpse lies bounding in a hearse;
And friends and relatives disperse,
       And are not stirred.

Those living dead up in their rooms
Must note how partial are the tombs,
That take men back into their wombs
       While theirs must fast.
And those who have their blooms in jars
No longer stare into the stars,
Instead, they watch the dinky cars—
       And live aghast.

TWILIGHT OF THE ILLICIT

OU, with your long blank udders
          And your calms,
Your spotted linen and your
Slack'ning arms.
With satiated fingers dragging
At your palms.

Your knees set far apart like
Heavy spheres;
With discs upon your eyes like
Husks of tears,
And great ghastly loops of gold
Snared in your ears.

Your dying hair hand-beaten
’Round your head.
Lips, long lengthened by wise words
Unsaid.
And in your living all grimaces
Of the dead.

One sees you sitting in the sun
Asleep;
With the sweeter gifts you had
And didn't keep,
One grieves that the altars of
Your vice lie deep.

You, the twilight powder of
A fire-wet dawn;
You, the massive mother of
Illicit spawn;
While the others shrink in virtue
You have borne.

We'll see you staring in the sun
A few more years,
With discs upon your eyes like
Husks of tears;
And great ghastly loops of gold
Snared in your ears.

TO A CABARET DANCER

 THOUSAND lights had smitten her
       Into this thing;
Life had taken her and given her
        One place to sing.

She came with laughter wide and calm;
        And splendid grace;
And looked between the lights and wine
        For one fine face.

And found life only passion wide
        ’Twixt mouth and wine.
She ceased to search, and growing wise
        Became less fine.

Yet some wondrous thing within the mess
        Was held in check:—
Was missing as she groped and clung
        About his neck.

One master chord we couldn't sound
        For lost the keys,
Yet she hinted of it as she sang
        Between our knees.

We watched her come with subtle fire
        And learned feet,
Stumbling among the lustful drunk
        Yet somehow sweet.

We saw the crimson leave her cheeks
        Flame in her eyes;
For when a woman lives in awful haste
        A woman dies.

The jests that lit our hours by night
        And made them gay,
Soiled a sweet and ignorant soul
        And fouled its play.

Barriers and heart both broken—dust
        Beneath her feet.
You've passed her forty times and sneered
        Out in the street.

A thousand jibes had driven her
        To this at last;
Till the ruined crimson of her lips
        Grew vague and vast.

Until her songless soul admits
        Time comes to kill;
You pay her price and wonder why
        You need her still.

SUICIDE

Corpse A

HEY brought her in, a shattered small
       Cocoon,
With a little bruised body like
A startled moon;
And all the subtle symphonies of her
A twilight rune.

Corpse B

HEY gave her hurried shoves this way
        And that.
Her body shock-abbreviated
As a city cat.
She lay out listlessly like some small mug
Of beer gone flat.

About The Book of Repulsive Women

Excerpts from Andrew Field's biography Djuna, The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes (G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York 1983) which concern The Book of Repulsive Women:

"The first book by Djuna Barnes, really more a booklet with eight poems and five drawings, The Book of Repulsive Women, appeared as Number 20, Special Series, of the Chap Books in November 1915. It sold for fifteen cents at first, but its price was very quickly raised to fifty cents when it became clear that the chapbook was enjoying notoriety. ...
   The atmosphere of Barnes' eight "rhythms" is quite in keeping with the book's title. We must remember that while this was a period in which the forces of European Decadence were still being very much felt, no less in the United States than in Scandinavia, Italy, Poland and Russia, there was certainly in all the English-speaking countries as late as 1915 an extraordinary reticence on sexual themes in literature. Oscar Wilde did not write his homosexuality; he merely practised it. The Book of Repulsive Women, a full decade before Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness, was the first modern literary work in English to bring the theme of woman's "bitter secret" (it is never named) to the misty fore:

Someday beneath some hard
Capricious star—
Spreading its light a little
Over far,
We'll know you for the woman
That you are.

...

See you sagging down with bulging
Hair to sip,
The dappled damp from some vague
Under lip,
Your soft saliva, loosed
With orgy, drip.

One must assume that, in spite of the collection's title and the telltale word orgy, the Sumner committee was either incapable of recognizing or of articulating what that "vague under lip" from which the repulsive woman sags down to sip was. Barnes had boldly and deftly taken advantage of a public inability to comprehend what such images might portray. Thus there was an astonishingly easy if meaningless victory over censorship. Like Queen Victoria when her advice was sought on the legal position of lesbians, the American censors evidently couldn't imagine the offense.

...

It has been the tendency in discussions of the Barnes oeuvre to relegate The Book of Repulsive Women to the bin of "early work," which these poems certainly are, and yet some of the best stanzas have the same anemic power of early Eliot and phrases that stick in the mind:

Those living dead up in their rooms
Must note how partial are the tombs,
That take men back into their wombs
       While theirs must fast.
And those who have their blooms in jars
No longer stare into the stars,
Instead, they watch the dinky cars—
       And live aghast.

...

The Book of Repulsive Women remained an underground work. It was to be more than half a century before it was even mentioned in print.

...

   Miss Barnes began to avoid the word publisher altogether. She said printer instead, and much worse. She had to contend with a pirated edition of The Book of Repulsive Women issued by a Yonkers bookseller. ..."

Final comments

The 1948 Alicat Bookshop Press edition, on which this Internat page is based, was not only pirated but also very cheaply made and hard to read (green type on thick blackish paper). It also left out the author's dedication:

TO MOTHER
who was more or less like All
mothers, but she was mine, —and
so— She excelled

Even though I might incur the late Djuna Barnes' wrath (it's very likely she'd group me with the "printers or much worse") by publishing this on the Internet, I simply could not resist. The Book of Repulsive Women — including the curiosity of the pirated edition — is a true underground gem of 20th century literature.

Johannes Beilharz, December 2000