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a second letter, “Aug 27 1923”, Barnes writes about her drawings of three of her fellow Lost Generation writers and artists, Ezra Pound, Jules Pascin, and Gertrude Stein, and enquires about a piece of her journalism (“what was done with my article on a Middle aged Lady?”); and in the third Barnes recommends to Drake the work of her friend and fellow Parisian poet, Mina Loy (“she is undoubtedly of interest”), whose collection Lunar Baedeker had just been published. The three fragments together give a fascinating insight into the difficult business of publishing in the 1920s, as well as Barnes’s own virtuosity as an artist. Barnes lived the bohemian life for many years in Greenwich Village, contributing “short stories, Beardsley-esque drawings, theatrical reviews, interviews, and news reports for almost every English-language newspaper in New York” ( ODNB ), but it was in Paris where she first began experimenting with the modernist avant-garde. Her first visit there was on a journalistic assignment for McCall’s magazine in 1921; her second, in 1922, was to interview James Joyce for Vanity Fair . The two became friends, and Joyce sent Barnes a copy of the proof sheets for Ulysses . By the following year, Barnes was firmly embedded within the community of expatriate modernists in Paris, appearing “in almost every literary memoir of Paris at this time” (ibid.). Together 3 items, 2 typed letters signed, addressed from the “University Union, 173 Blvd. St. Germain, Paris” and “‘Le Colombier’, Cagnes A.M.”, and 1 autograph letter signed, also from the University Union. Small rust marks from staples to two letters, lightly creased from folding, overall very good. £4,000 [158179]
annotation to the latter ascribes a year of 1926); 3) autograph letter signed, 10 July, on headed paper, 8 Little College Street, Westminster; 4) sepia postcard from Paris, 4 December 1951. The Happy Foreigner : inner hinges cracked and sometime repaired, contents clean and unmarked. A Diary Without Dates : spine darkened, head of spine somewhat chipped, contents slightly toned, otherwise clean and unmarked. A very nice set. ¶ Janet Lee, War Girls: The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry in the Great War , 2005. £1,500 [139421] 5 BARNES, Djuna. Three letters signed, two typed and one autograph. [1923] Letters from Lost Generation Paris, name-checking Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Mina Loy A remarkable group of three unpublished letters from Djuna Barnes to her editor, one Mr Drake, offering a rare insight into the experiences of a struggling writer in the restless and vivacious world of Paris in the 1920s. The recipient may well have been William A. Drake (1899– 1965), who worked as an assistant editor for Vanity Fair in New York throughout the 1920s, where Barnes also published a number of her early pieces. Drake was something of a minor player in his own right, translating the works of continental writers into English, and publishing essays on contemporary literature, many of which he collected together in his book Contemporary European Writers (1928). The letters present a vibrant picture of modernism in the making, detailing Barnes’s efforts to get poems, drawings, and journalism into print. In the first, dated “May 12”, Barnes writes to Drake resisting any changes to her poem “Portrait of a Lady Walking”, which remained unpublished in her lifetime (“I do not like the suggestions made by Miss Gregory . . . The second the in the first line is intentional, as are the two ful’s in the second”); in
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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