JANE BOWLES

Two Serious Ladies came into my life in my junior year in college, when, while perusing the tables at the university bookstore, I found myself drawn to a slim paperback with a striking—and ugly—front cover, a drawing of two women in cloche hats, one wearing a fox stole, set against a black background; and with, on the back, a black-and-white photograph of the author, Jane Bowles, seated amid what appears to be tropical foliage, her hand upon her hip, her rather arch, elfin gaze over her right shoulder, while a black-and-white kitten climbs her shirtfront and a bright-eyed parrot prepares to whisper in her ear.

I can’t say whether it was the odd but appealing photograph or the odd but unappealing drawing that prompted me to open the book. I think, perhaps, it was their unlikely combination. Even before I got to the novel’s first page, I encountered other writers’ encomia: John Ashbery called Jane Bowles “one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language”; Alan Sillitoe anointed the novel “A landmark in twentieth-century American literature”; Truman Capote deemed her “One of the really original pure stylists”; James Purdy said she was “an unmatchable talent”; Tennessee Williams announced that she was “the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters.”

Why hadn’t I heard of her? With the arrogance of youth, I thought I’d laid out the map of twentieth-century letters. There was a great deal I hadn’t yet read; but I believed—in my ignorance—that at least I knew what there was to read. I flipped to the back for her biography, and there discovered that she’d been married to the writer Paul Bowles (best known, of course, for The Sheltering Sky)—a committed, but unconventional union, as both of them were gay; that she’d been peripatetic, and had lived, among other places, in Mexico and Morocco; that she was Jewish but died in a Spanish convent, in 1973, at the age of fifty-six. Her “flamboyant” life was described as “short” and “stormy.”

The signs were propitious, enticing. (Now in mid-life, I feel a deep sadness at the brevity of her life that I could not, when not yet twenty myself. Then, “short” and “stormy” sounded glamorous.) But it was upon reading the first page of the first chapter of the novel—standing in the aisle sweating in my winter coat with my book bag weighing on my shoulder—that I knew I couldn’t leave the shop without it. I simply could not put it down.

I would soon learn to my dismay that Two Serious Ladies was the only novel Jane Bowles ever completed. It was not especially well received upon its publication in 1943. Her play In the Summer House was produced in 1954, again, to mixed reviews. Her complete oeuvre, published as My Sister’s Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles, with an introduction by Truman Capote, amounts to fewer than five hundred pages, and includes, in addition to the novel and the play, several short stories and some fragments.

In part this small output is a result of her brief life: Bowles died at fifty-six, but at the age of forty suffered a stroke that left her significantly impaired and unable to write. In part, too, it is a result of her tormented, self-critical nature and of her reliance on alcohol. Like many mid-century writers, she drank a good deal. In part, arguably, her husband’s greater success as a fiction writer (when first they met he was an up-and-coming composer, rather than a writer) proved a further obstacle—although she would vehemently have denied this.

But the fruits we do have of her thoroughly original mind—a mind at once profoundly witty, genuinely unusual in its apprehensions, and bracingly, humanly true—are eminently worth savoring. As Francine du Plessix Gray wrote in her 1978 introduction to the Virago Modern Classics edition of the novel, “Mrs. Bowles’s oeuvre is all the more unique because of its Grand Guignol hilarity, its constant surprises, and a blend of realism and grotesqueness . . . [her] lithe, feverish dialogue has a blend of childlike integrity, surreal candour and deadly precision often worthy of Lewis Carroll.”

MILLICENT DILLON, Jane Bowles’s biographer, writes in A Little Original Sin: The Life & Work of Jane Bowles (1981) that “From the first words, something of what she told, something of what she withheld, her style and her language touched me as if I’d come upon a world I’d once known but had forgotten.” This was my experience also.

When, on the novel’s first page, we are introduced to Christina Goering—a character whose religious bent is enfolded in her first name; and whose tyrannical nature alluded to in her last—we learn that:

As a child Christina had been very much disliked by other children. She had never suffered particularly because of this, having led, even at a very early age, an active inner life that curtailed her observation of whatever went on around her . . . Even then [at the age of ten] she wore the look of certain fanatics who think of themselves as leaders without once having gained the respect of a single human being.

Upon reading these sentences, spritely in tone but rapier-sharp, I thought, first, But I know exactly that girl Christina—as we have all known such a girl—and second, I want to know this writer, who sees the world as I know it to be, but with a sly new clarity. I thought, too, Here is a new and abiding companion for my literary journey. It was, for me as for Millicent Dillon, a coup de foudre.

As a child, Christina Goering, we learn further, “was in the habit of going through many mental struggles—generally of a religious nature—and she preferred to be with other people and organize games. These games, as a rule, were very moral, and often involved God.” When she ropes her little sister Sophie’s friend Mary into just such a game—a bitter, mucky baptismal lark called “I forgive you for all your sins”—Mary asks, “Is it fun?” and Christina answers—oh, how well I know her now!—“It’s not for fun that we play it, but because it’s necessary to play it.”

Herein lies the seriousness of Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies, Miss Christina Goering and her friend Mrs. Frieda Copperfield. Superficially, their lives may appear whimsical, even rackety—they drift from place to place, from acquaintance to acquaintance—but in fact, each woman is embarked on a tremendously earnest quest: their apparently frivolous movements are prompted by invisible codes of ethics, shaped by perilously constructed moralities. For each woman, her seemingly bizarre actions are not undertaken for fun, but because they are, in the service of those moralities, absolutely necessary.

Christina Goering, who is wealthy (she explains to her companion, the truculent Miss Gamelon, that each of us has a guardian angel, who “comes when you are very young, and gives you special dispensation . . . Yours might be luck; mine is money”), decides to sell her fine home and move to a small, uncomfortable house in the farther reaches of what appears to be Staten Island. Her reasoning is that “in order to work out my own little idea of salvation I really believe that it is necessary for me to live in some tawdry place and particularly in some place where I was not born.”

This she does, in the company of Miss Gamelon, a creature as unexpectedly discordant as the Balinese orchestra of similar name, and whose interest in Christina is in significant part financial; and of Arnold, a “stout, dark-haired man” in his late thirties who propositions her at a party (where she also sees her friend Mrs. Copperfield), and with whom her life becomes entangled. Both of these hangers-on are uncomplainingly financially supported by Christina Goering: as Mrs. Copperfield wisely points out, in a different context, the rich “want to be liked for their money too, and not only for themselves.” Christina has her eye on greater things, and preserving her fortune appears to be of no more importance than her own physical comfort. Of their move to the island, a frustrated Miss Gamelon observes to Arnold, “There are certain people . . . who turn peace from the door as though it were a red dragon breathing fire out of its nostrils and there are certain people who won’t leave God alone either.”

Mrs. Copperfield, meanwhile, sets off for Panama with her husband, even though she has announced to her friend that “I don’t think I can bear it . . . Really, Miss Goering, it frightens me so much to go.” Having landed at the port of Colon and arrived at a seedy hotel of her husband’s choosing in the red-light district, she is alarmingly disoriented, and decides, “I must try to find a nest in this outlandish place.” Bowles explains that “Mrs. Copperfield’s sole object in life was to be happy, although people who had observed her behavior over a period of years would have been surprised to discover that this was all.”

The “nest” Mrs. Copperfield finds for herself—to her husband’s grave dismay—is in another red-light establishment, the Hotel de las Palmas, where she settles in the company of a teenage prostitute named Pacifica and the hotel’s owner, an older woman named Mrs. Quill. The reassurance that Pacifica provides (as with the others, her name is not irrelevant) has to do, in part, with her enviable fearlessness. As Mrs. Quill observes,

when I got married, I felt like a scared rabbit. As if I was going out into the world. Mr. Quill was like a family to me, though, and it wasn’t until he died that I really got out into the world . . . Pacifica’s really been out in the world much longer than I have. You know, she is like an old sea captain . . . It isn’t so much a question of age as it is a question of experience. The Lord has spared me more than he has spared Pacifica. She hasn’t been spared a single thing. Still, she’s not as nervous as I am.

In one of the novel’s most moving scenes, Mrs. Copperfield accompanies Pacifica to the beach, where Pacifica offers to teach the older woman to swim. There ensues an echo of Christina Goering’s childhood baptism of Mary; but one in which Mrs. Copperfield feels successfully protected—even, in Christina’s terms, “saved.” Afterward, “Mrs. Copperfield collapsed on the sand and hung her head like a wilted flower. She was trembling and exhausted as one is after a love experience.”

For Mrs. Copperfield, who often must resort to gin to find her happiness—“At a certain point gin takes everything off your hands and you flop around like a little baby. Tonight I want to be like a little baby”—Pacifica’s companionship proves indispensable. When Mrs. Copperfield elects to stay with Pacifica and Mrs. Quill rather than leave Colon with her husband, her decision feels both enormously difficult and inevitable:

She trembled so violently that she shook the bed. She was suffering as much as she had ever suffered before, because she was going to do what she wanted to do. But it would not make her happy. She did not have the courage to stop from doing what she wanted to do. She knew that it would not make her happy, because only the dreams of crazy people come true. She thought that she was only interested in duplicating a dream, but in doing so she necessarily became the victim of a nightmare.

Mrs. Copperfield surmounts at least one of her great fears, and takes control of her own life. If you will, she becomes “Frieda” rather than “Mrs. Copperfield.” The outcome of her courage looks, to the world, like a disaster: when she encounters Christina Goering in New York some months later, the latter, alarmed, suggests that her friend has “gone to pieces.” Mrs. Copperfield, however, is unrepentant:

I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I’ve wanted to do for years. I know I am as guilty as can be, but I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which, if you remember correctly, I never had before.

Christina Goering, meanwhile, having set up house uncomfortably and in self-imposed poverty, has continued to push herself not to new heights but to new depths: ultimately she is not simply mistaken for a prostitute but employed as one. In making solo excursions to the mainland from her new island home, in forcing herself to go where she least wants to, “She even felt a kind of elation, which is common in certain unbalanced but sanguine persons when they begin to approach the thing they fear.”

As she explains to a young woman named Bernice in a dive bar on the mainland:

It wasn’t exactly in order to have a good time that I came out. I have more or less forced myself to, simply because I despise going out in the night-time alone and prefer not to leave my own house. However, it has come to such a point that I am forcing myself to make these little excursions.

The same idiosyncratic ethical code that prompted her religious games as a child now shapes her actions in adulthood. Not long after abandoning Miss Gamelon and Arnold to become the girlfriend of a down-and-out fellow named Andy that she meets in the bar, she abandons Andy in his turn for a gangster named Ben:

For several days it had been quite clear to Miss Goering that Andy was no longer thinking of himself as a bum. This would have pleased her greatly had she been interested in reforming her friends, but unfortunately she was only interested in the course that she was following in order to attain her own salvation. She was fond of Andy, but during the last two nights she had felt an urge to leave him.

At the novel’s conclusion, Miss Goering has a rare, fleeting moment of insight: “ ‘Certainly I am nearer to becoming a saint . . . but is it possible that a part of me hidden from my sight is piling sin upon sin as fast as Mrs. Copperfield?’ This latter possibility Miss Goering thought to be of considerable interest but of no great importance.”

The parallel trajectories of Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield—from financially comfortable bourgeois lives to impoverished isolation in a world of gangsters and prostitutes—hardly seem, from the outside, like paths towards sainthood or salvation. On the one hand, they may appear to be merely the indulgent playacting of women of privilege (I’m reminded of the late-’90s Pulp song “Common People”: “You wanna live like common people . . . you wanna sleep with common people, you wanna sleep with common people like me . . .”). Seen thus, they may seem at no great remove from Christina in autocratic and disagreeable childhood, insisting upon her selfish fantasies without concern for others.

But these two women are, at the same time, in deadly earnest. Mrs. Copperfield really does leave her husband for Pacifica. Christina Goering really does sleep with unsavory strangers she picks up in bars. They do not subscribe to a common or readily recognizable morality (indeed, they may by some lights be “piling sin upon sin”) but each has carefully outlined her morality nonetheless. One pursues a path of asceticism, the other of a more intangible but no less dramatic renunciation. If this is a game, everything is at stake.

IN A LETTER to Paul Bowles in early August, 1947, Jane wrote: “Certainly Carson McCullers is as talented as Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir but she is not really a serious writer. I am serious but I am isolated and my experience is probably of no interest at this point to anyone.” She goes on to refer to an article by de Beauvoir entitled “New Heroes,” of which she says, “It is what I have been thinking at the bottom of my mind all this time and God knows it is difficult to write the way I do and yet think their way.”

A great deal is explained in this short passage. Jane Bowles was exactly the same age as Carson McCullers, whose work shared a similar penchant for so-called grotesque characters—both can be compared to their slightly younger contemporary, the photographer Diane Arbus, focusing their artwork on socially peripheral lives. But whereas McCullers was widely acclaimed and fashionable, Bowles had received only mixed notices for her work and worried that “really Two Serious Ladies never was a novel.” She felt “isolated” in various ways—having battled tuberculosis of the knee as a teenager, she walked with a limp and jokingly called herself “Crippie the Kike Dyke”—and apparently assumed that McCullers did not. Her calibrated envy is both palpable and understandable. If she and McCullers both wrote about neurotics and freaks, she felt that what distinguished her from McCullers was a seriousness of purpose, a philosophical underpinning.

Reading Sartre and de Beauvoir, Bowles found kinship with their existentialist philosophy: the ultimate question of how to forge a self in a Godless world is the question with which Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield are grappling. The writer Lorna Sage has rightly pointed out the connection between Jane Bowles and the philosopher, mystic, and ascetic Simone Weil. Bowles’s women are simultaneously existential paragons and thoroughly feminist protagonists, women in search of elusive, meaningful self-determination, inhabiting at once a concrete world of shabby hotel rooms and dark bars, and a more spiritual, nebulously Godless, plane of sin and salvation. They are by no means familiar heroines; nor are their choices easy to fathom; but it would be wrong to dismiss them as trivial neurotics or mere game-players. The consequences of their choices are very real: paradoxically, each of them, in attempting to make a self, must “go to pieces.”

Millicent Dillon observes that Bowles’s novel is “autobiographical . . . but not in the confessional sense. It is autobiographical in that in every moment of the novel Jane is present in each of her characters.” Bowles was famously indecisive, in part because she fretted that each decision, however small, might have lasting moral implications. She was also, in youth, extremely fearful, constrained by an impressive catalogue of anxieties and phobias. But she pushed hard against her nature. According to one friend, “Jane was vulnerable and strong. She was always testing herself and she kept on testing to see how it would come out if she put herself in danger.”

To Dillon, Paul described Jane early in their marriage staying out late, returning home barefoot. When he’d ask where she’d been:

She’d answer that she’d been wandering around the docks all by herself at four or five in the morning.

“Why?”

“Because that was the one place I didn’t want to be. I’m terrified of it.”

“Then, Jane, why did you go?”

“Don’t ask me. You ought to know why. I had to or I couldn’t face myself in the mirror tomorrow if I hadn’t gone because that was the one thing I was afraid of.”

As with her characters, there is, here, on one level an element of whimsy: there was no call for Jane Bowles to wander the docks before dawn, when she had a safe home and a partner awaiting her return. But by the same token, there was a deadly earnestness in her endeavor: in pursuit of her own code, this tiny woman did put herself in danger, without seeking support, in order to justify something to herself—in order, like Christina Goering, to find her own salvation.

Jane Bowles is a writer of surprises and contradictions. Acerbic, willfully unsettling, she renders the familiar new, undercuts our social and emotional expectations. Her work, ironic and complex, alternately oblique and direct, defies categorization. Tennessee Williams wrote, of her play In the Summer House, that it was “a piece of dramatic literature that stands altogether alone, without antecedents and without descendants, unless they spring from the one and only Jane Bowles.” Her friend the academic Wendell Wilcox concurred, saying: “God knows Jane’s stories were exotic but the really exotic element was Jane herself. Both the story and the telling are completely natural in Jane and come from nowhere outside herself. No one but Jane could have written a line of them.” He went on: “I talked in this way to her and tried to make her feel less desolate about her work.”

Jane was temperamentally and artistically original. She was herself a misfit; if you will, a grotesque. Lesbian but married; American but living most of her life abroad (as a teenager in France and Switzerland; later in Mexico; and then, for the longest stretch, Morocco); friends with many artists but truly intimate with none, except her husband Paul, with whom her relationship became increasingly complicated and whose reputation superseded and overshadowed her own. Never fashionable, she had a passionate small following—but she expressed her anxiety about this situation in a Vogue interview after the production of In the Summer House, when she said, “There’s no point in writing a play for your five hundred goony friends. You have to reach more people.”

There is great, even unbearable, sadness in the unfolding of Jane Bowles’s life, just as there is considerable darkness in her fiction. But there is also much delight, vivacity, and even joy in her work. There is a reason that, in spite of her small oeuvre, generation after generation returns to her novel, her play, and her stories. Those “five hundred goony friends” have multiplied exponentially. She has influenced now generations of writers; and for many of us, her voice has felt as special, as intimate and cherished, as that of a close and particularly beloved relation.