Why people once read Nightwood

Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936) is one of those novels that everyone (except me, aparently) read in college in the 60s or 70s - one of the first 100 New Directions pb w/ its distinctive untra-cool b/w cover. What's more, it merited not just one but 2 forewords from TS Eliot! Offhand one would not suspect this book - surreal and sexual and hip - to be high on the reading list of the cerebral, devout, snobbish, Anglophile, but there you have it. And on reading the novel, at least the first half or so, I can now see that there are Eliot-like elements: The long journey through various night haunts (jazz clubs, the circus, salons) is somewhat like the Waste Land, and one of the lead characters, Felix, with his attempts to distance himself from this Jewish ancestry by becoming a devotee of rank and a collector of antiquities, seems a little Prufrock-like. And it's easy to see why this novel was popular back in the day: Hallucinogenic and, to be honest, nearly incomprehensible, at least on first reading. It's like a prose version of a poem (or book of poems) by Rimbaud. I imagine thousands of would-be poets and artists reading through the novel for its hypnotic mood alone - not really following the story line, if there even is one, just "tripping." Today, the novel looks quaint and pretentious; some of the once-shocking elements, most notably the lesbian relationships among some of the key characters (as well as their Pynchon-like names - e.g., the American woman Robin Vote) are no longer shocking or even amusing. I'll read a little further to see if Nightwood starts making sense, but it seems to me so far that this novel, today, is mostly a historical curiosity.