9 Famous Unknowns: The Dramas of Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein Sarah Bay-Cheng I am the most famous unknown of the century! Djuna Barnes, letter to Natalie Barney (May 31, 1963) I always wanted to be historical . . . Gertrude Stein, ‘‘A Message from Gertrude Stein’’ (1946) When Djuna Barnes complained to Natalie Barney that she was ‘‘the most famous unknown of the century,’’ she expressed not only regret at the lack of critical attention to her work, but also the central paradox of her dramatic writing. While Barnes craved the critical and popular attention of her male modernist contemporaries, such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, she was also an intensely private person who talked little about her life in general and even less about her unorthodox childhood. Yet, throughout her writing, her plays in particular, Barnes frequently draws from her life experience. Her parody of the expatriate lesbian community in Paris, Ladies Almanack (1928), is based directly on Barnes’s circle of friends. Both of her major novels, Ryder (1928) and Nightwood (1936), are loosely based on different periods from her life. The first is an anguished portrayal of her family, and the second a deeply personal, though stylistically dense, rendering of her eight-year relationship with fellow expatriate and artist Thelma Wood. Though written in a highly abstruse style, Nightwood was clear enough for Wood to ‘‘hit Barnes in the mouth, knock her down twice, and throw a cup of tea at her when the novel was read aloud’’ (Herring 1995: 165). Indeed, so visible appears the source material for much of Barnes’s writing that her biographers have repeatedly turned to her fiction and drama for evidence of the events in her life. One central event biographers often attempt to unveil, and one that recurs throughout her writing, is the traumatic, perhaps violent, loss of Djuna Barnes’s A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama Edited by David Krasner Copyright © 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd