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6 BARNES, Djuna. Nightwood. London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1936 Inscribed just after publication to one of the most influential magazine editors in America First edition, first impression, rare presentation copy, inscribed by the author to the American editor who had commissioned articles from Barnes earlier in her career, “For Harry with my love Djuna London Oct 31 – 36”, on the front free endpaper. Inscribed just two weeks after publication, this copy wonderfully retains the original paper wrapper that Barnes used as an envelope. This is a superb association: Harry Payne Burton (1931–1942) was a ground-breaking American editor of both McCall’s Magazine and Cosmopolitan . Under his editorship, circulation of McCall’s doubled to over $2.5 million and advertising quadrupled to almost $8.5 million, and during this time he began to commission articles from Barnes. Burton won over readers “by filling the magazine with big-name fiction writers” and became the most highly paid magazine editor in America (Luerck, p. 220). “More than any editor of his time [he] studied publishing trends to discover what American women wanted to read. What they seemed to want was sophistication, a hint of illicit romance, a peek at fashion – all of which Barnes’s journalism provided” (Herring, p. 130). “By 1917 Djuna Barnes was earning five thousand dollars a year as a freelance feature writer. Fifteen dollars for an article was considered good payment in the 1910s; Barnes could, and often did, write several a day. By the time she left for Europe in 1920, she had published more than a hundred articles and over twenty-five short plays and fictions. The New York Tribune employed her as a stringer during her early years in Paris, Berlin, and the south of France. McCall’s , Vanity Fair , Charm , and the New Yorker commissioned articles and interviews that featured personages
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famous, rich, or royal. McCall’s editor, Harry Payne Burton, for example, sent Barnes a $500 check to a Barcelona address in 1925 for an article on international marriage among the elite. During the 1920s, Barnes’ popular journalism was an uncertain source of income, allowing her to publish her serious fiction and poetry in literary journals with small budgets . . . In these early pieces Barnes is flexing muscles she will use when she creates the characters of Nightwood . . . Nightwood is proof that Barnes absorbed, retained, and used what she had seen as a newspaper writer” (Levine, pp. 28–34). This is Barnes’s masterwork, “highly charged . . . linguistically complex, and riven with pain and loss. It centres on the anguished narratives of Matthew O’Connor, a transvestite gynaecologist, and Nora Flood, who is in love with the enigmatic and boyish woman Robin Vote,” and is considered to have “one of the most shattering endings in modern literature. It took years for Barnes to find a publisher, until [her friend Emily] Coleman pressured T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber to accept it. Eliot, who wrote the preface, thought it was like an Elizabethan tragedy for its ‘quality of horror and doom’” ( ODNB ). It is now considered
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