One night in 1979 someone pushed Jacqueline Onassis out of the way so they could ask me a question. This sounds improbable but it happened and this is why it did.

I was pinch-hitting for Berenice Abbott at the International Center of Photography. She was supposed to make a speech but couldn’t because she was hiding out in Maine and I took her place. This was years before the ICP became as institutionalized as it has become today and somebody not part of the photo establishment could be called up to be a stand in. Mrs. Onassis was there because she was the editor of the book Berenice and I were doing together, plus she was on the Board of the ICP.

When I finished the formal remarks, I was chatting with Mrs. Onassis when two girls in flannel shirts pushed their way between us and one said, “You’re Hank O’Neal, the man who knows Djuna Barnes. We have to interview her for the Lesbian Archives.” Mrs. Onassis was about as used to being shoved around as Barnes was used to being called “Djuna Baby,” which she was one day by Dr. Robert Coles, who had bravely consented to try and save Barnes’ cataract clouded eyes. Jolly Dr. Coles burst into his waiting room, saw Barnes, and thinking he might cheer her, gave her a pat on the back and said, “Well, how are you today, Djuna baby?” He then picked up the eyeballs which had just popped out of her head and were rolling around on the floor, replaced them carefully, and later operated on them and saved what was left of her sight.

While she was in the hospital following surgery the “leather-clad pansy,” to use her words, left his hot tub playpen running. This flooded Barnes’ apartment, set things on fire for a minute and collapsed the ceiling above her bed. Barnes would have loved to have seen the firemen bursting in to save her. But that’s another story, one that can be found, along with many, many others is a memoir I wrote  about my years with Barnes. It was published in 1990 and entitled Life Is Painful, Nasty and Short …. In My Case, It Has Only Been Painful and Nasty.

Barnes was a force to be reckoned with, but few did because she was a hermit, and often an acidic, ill-tempered hermit. I spent so much time with her because Berenice Abbott asked me to. They had been pals since the 1910s, shared lovers and Berenice knew I wasn’t going to drool over her friend or get excited about her poetry. She asked me to help her out and I did; it was as simple as that. 

The story of Djuna Barnes is remarkable and I detail a good deal about her final years in my book. There is still a cottage industry in publishing and republishing her many pre-1935 works, along with biographies and critical appraisals, and now with the Internet, it is growing and things are popping up that would have horrified Barnes. The funny thing is, however, that none of the people involved in these enterprises ever met this remarkable, but terribly difficult, frequently confused woman. Two short extracts from my memoir offer glimpse into this extremely complicated situation.

I wanted to have an introduction written by one of Barnes’ contemporaries to accompany my book. In 1990 there were only six people alive who qualified: Berenice Abbott, Samuel Beckett, Kay Boyle, Kenneth Burke, Malcolm Cowley and Charles Henri Ford. Because of literary quarrels, lack of contact and sexual indiscretions, four were eliminated. Berenice Abbott and Malcolm Cowley became the only acceptable candidates; both had known her since 1918 and had been in touch with her over the years. The possibility of an introduction was discussed with both. In July 1987 Abbott stated firmly, “Djuna bores me to death and she was a literary snob as well. I have no interest in writing about her.” A month later Cowley wrote, “Owing to the fragilities of old age, I have been forced to stop writing. If I started again an introduction to a book about Djuna is one of the subjects I should least willingly undertake.” I wrote a preface and this remains my only book that doesn’t have an appropriate introduction.

This is how I described a more serious incident in 1981. Shortly after this late evening episode came the final insult, the final failure. Barnes telephoned me at my office one afternoon and asked that I please come by as soon as it was convenient. It was not a life or death situation she said, but would I please hurry. I arrived a short while later and found her sitting on the edge of her bed, disheveled, with almost no color in her face. She looked helpless. Most of the bottles on the table beside her bed were overturned or on the floor. Next to her, on the bed, was a crumpled paper bag. She looked at me and said, “They always told me I could do it with what I had at hand and I tried but it didn’t work.”

She’d taken all her bottles of medicine and emptied them into the paper bag, taken two handfuls of the pills, and swallowed them with a few gulps of ginger ale. The result was nothing more than an upset stomach; the pills didn’t even make her drowsy. She had summoned the energy to kill herself, but it didn’t work: she’d failed. Time and time again she told me about her stay in the hospital when an orderly had told her she could kill herself with a massive dose of the medication at hand. Now she knew it wasn’t so and found herself left with nausea, a paper bag of pills and even more despair.

She asked if I would please sort the pills and return them to their proper bottles. She would continue to take her medication as prescribed and push on towards ninety. I gathered the bottled from the table and the floor and took them to her desk. I noticed that in her hurry she’d failed to empty two or three of the bottles into the bag; one that was still intact contained the sleeping pills. I said nothing.

Her nausea passed and she became hungry. She asked that I order something for both of us from Hunan Royal, the closest Chinese carryout. I agreed and as I was walking out the door to go pick it up, she reminded me to make certain absolutely no soy sauce was used in the preparation of her dish, that the doctor had said she should avoid salt. I shook my head in wonder as I wandered up to 12th Street. I arrived and the owner asks, “How’s grandma?” He had been making special lo mien dishes for me for over a year. By habit I said she was fine and then added, “watch the soy sauce.” How silly it was, I thought, Barnes had just tried to kill herself, the ultimate act of depriving oneself of life itself and when this proved to be impossible, the next best thing was to deprive oneself of a tasty meal, because the salt in the soy sauce was against her doctor’s orders.

The 400 or so meetings I had with Barnes during the years 1978 through 1981 were fascinating and are outlined in the book. These meeting were both illuminating and frustrating, always time consuming, but usually most enjoyable. My comments about Barnes have been largely ignored by most of the people who are part of the Barnes mini-industry. The reasons are three-fold: I am not a woman, I am not gay and, most importantly, I’m not an academic with letters before or after my name. The ramblings of a scholar about an obscure word in the last line of a long forgotten poem by Barnes is considered by some far more important than a description of how she really was or what she may have thought about one thing or another. Of course, Barnes would be horrified by it all, my comments, and the many reissues of what she considered inconsequential work, and all the speculation by academics. And frankly, I don’t care.