SOURCE: "So Much Genius, So Little Talent," in New York Times Book Review, November 26, 1995, p. 12.

In the following review. Seymour asserts that while "[Barnes has been partly revealed [in Phillip Herring's Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes]: a bigger and bolder exposure is still needed."]

Few authors have achieved so much celebrity with one novel as the elegant, exotic Djuna Barnes, without whom no account of Greenwich Village in the teens, or the Left Bank in the 1920's, is complete. That one novel was Nightwood. Overwritten and self-indulgent, it carries off its flaws with splendid nonchalance. Admired by Joyce, Nightwood is as important to the history of the 20th-century novel as Finnegans Wake—and more readable.

It was published in 1936, when Barnes was 44 and still overwhelmed by the departure of her lover, Thelma Wood. Wood appears in the book as the elusive, promiscuous Robin Vote, reduced...