Spotlight on … Jane Bowles Plain Pleasures (1966)

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‘A good friend recently became a better one still by urging me to read Jane Bowles, whose writing inspired her husband Paul, previously known as a composer, to take up prose. Jane Bowles (née Auer), who was born in New York in 1917 and died in Malaga in 1973, wrote comparatively little – one novel (La Phaeton Hypocrite, a piece of juvenilia, notwithstanding), one play, and one short story collection – but her small oeuvre is distinguished by its quality and innovation.

‘The stories that make up Plain Pleasures, written between 1944 and 1951, are typical in their juxtaposing of domineering and weak women, and frequent preoccupation with moments of psychological crisis. There might be nothing distinctive about that, perhaps, but Bowles’s ability to convey a mind in flux is powerfully discomfiting. In part this is due to the feeling, which infuses her stories, that such a chaotic state is a more or less permanent feature of existence. Some argue that the alienation forced on her by her sexuality was partially responsible for this, but both her unconventional marriage (she and Paul were bisexual, with Paul preferring men and Jane women) and life in Tangiers afforded relative freedom in this regard.

‘A more interesting explanation was suggested by Paul Bowles – always an astute judge of Jane’s work – in a 1971 interview with Oliver Evans, when he noted her ability “to see the drama that is really in front of one every minute – the drama that follows living”. Navigating by such lights, her fiction charts some of the territory explored by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys. Her style, however, is closer to the reportorial terseness of Hemingway, but leavened with a dry wit that his prose lacks.

‘Humour is superficial in Bowles’s work, however. Much like the waterfall through whose roar Sadie, the doomed spinster in Camp Cataract (1949), believes she can hear “someone pronounce her name in a dismal tone”, the febrile thoughts of her characters seem to be suspended above yawning depths. Blank stares and non sequiturs abound, from the moment where Señora Ramirez’s memory “seemed suddenly to have failed her” during the seduction in A Guatemalan Idyll (1944), to the bizarrely stuttering, ambiguously homoerotic conversation between an American and a Moroccan in Everything Is Nice (1951).

‘According to Truman Capote, Bowles found writing “difficult to the point of true pain”. Paul Bowles concurred, remarking in an interview that it “cost her blood to write … Sometimes it took her a week to write a page”. She preferred socialising, drinking, conversation and promiscuity. Her original impulse to write was inspired by sociability, following as it did a meeting with Louis-Ferdinand Céline on a transatlantic crossing when she was 17.

‘But her difficulties were as much a product of an uncompromising determination to avoid convention as they were the result of being temperamentally unsuited to the writer’s lifestyle. For all that, though, the chief reason for Bowles’s modest output was a terrible series of strokes, the first of which she suffered in Morocco in 1957. After this she was incapable of producing anything of worth and, already an alcoholic, proceeded to drink so much that her lucid spells occurred only between periods of insanity and something resembling a vegetative state.’ — Chris Power

 

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Extras

Slideshow

Jane Bowles Documentary, part 1 (in Spanish)

‘A Quarreling Pair (1945)’, a puppet play by Jane Bowles

 

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Further

Jane Bowles Official Site
Event: Tribute to Jane Bowles @ KGB
Jane Bowles Obituary
‘The Oddest Couple: Jane and Paul Bowles’
‘The Gathering Spirit of Jane Bowles’
‘”Locked in Each Others’ Arms”: Jane Bowles’s Fiction of Psychic Dependency’
Biographer Millicent Dillon on Jane Bowles
‘A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles’
John Waters on Jane Bowles
Buy the books of Jane Bowles

 

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Slideshow

 

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Paul Bowles on Jane Bowles
from The Paris Review

 

Have you ever written a character who was supposed to be Jane Bowles, or a character who was directly modeled after her?

PAUL BOWLES: No, never.

Yet couldn’t one say that you both exerted a definite influence on each other’s work?

PB: Of course! We showed each other every page we wrote. I never thought of sending a story off without discussing it with her first. Neither of us had ever had a literary confidant before. I went over Two Serious Ladies with her again and again, until each detail was as we both thought it should be. Not that I put anything into it that she hadn’t written. We simply analyzed sentences and rhetoric. It was this being present at the making of a novel that excited me and made me want to write my own fiction. Remember, this was in 1942.

Tell me, would you please, about Jane Bowles.

PB: That’s an all-inclusive command! What can I possibly tell you about her that isn’t implicit in her writing?

She obviously had an extraordinary imagination. She was always coherent, but one had the feeling that she could go off the edge at any time. Almost every page of Two Serious Ladies, for example, evoked a sense of madness although it all flowed together very naturally.

PB: I feel that it flows naturally, yes. But I don’t find any sense of madness. Unlikely turns of thought, lack of predictability in the characters’ behavior, but no suggestion of “madness.” I love Two Serious Ladies. The action is often like the unfolding of a dream, and the background, with its realistic details, somehow emphasizes the sensation of dreaming.

Does this dreamlike quality reflect her personality?

PB: I don’t think anyone ever thought of Jane as a “dreamy” person; she was far too lively and articulate for that. She did have a way of making herself absent suddenly, when one could see that she was a thousand miles away. If you addressed her sharply, she returned with a start. And if you asked her about it, she would simply say: “I don’t know. I was somewhere else.”

Can you read her books and see Jane Bowles in them?

PB: Not at all; not the Jane Bowles that I knew. Her work contained no reports on her outside life. Two Serious Ladies was wholly nonautobiographical. The same goes for her stories.

She wasn’t by any means a prolific writer, was she?

PB: No, very unprolific. She wrote very slowly. It cost her blood to write. Everything had to be transmuted into fiction before she could accept it. Sometimes it took her a week to write a page. This exaggerated slowness seemed to me a terrible waste of time, but any mention of it to her was likely to make her stop writing entirely for several days or even weeks. She would say: “All right. It’s easy for you, but it’s hell for me, and you know it. I’m not you. I know you wish I were, but I’m not. So stop it.”

The relationships between her women characters are fascinating. They read like psychological portraits, reminiscent of Djuna Barnes.

PB: In fact, though, she refused to read Djuna Barnes. She never read Nightwood. She felt great hostility toward American women writers. Usually she refused even to look at their books.

Why was that?

PB: When Two Serious Ladies was first reviewed in 1943, Jane was depressed by the lack of understanding shown in the unfavorable reviews. She paid no attention to the enthusiastic notices. But from then on, she became very much aware of the existence of other women writers whom she’d met and who were receiving laudatory reviews for works which she thought didn’t deserve such high praise: Jean Stafford, Mary McCarthy, Carson McCullers, Anaïs Nin. There were others I can’t remember now. She didn’t want to see them personally or see their books.

 

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Book

Jane Bowles Plain Pleasures
Penguin

‘This collection of strikingly original and unsettling short stories combine bizarre characterization, sardonic wit and mastery of style.

‘Although Jane Bowles’s output was small, it was of dazzlingly brilliant quality. These stories provide a fascinating companion to her novel Two Serious Ladies and revolve around conflict, exploring people’s hidden lives and experience of sin and salvation. She writes so that we may eavesdrop on the conversations and meetings between characters, and creates a collection that is both troubling and funny.’ — Penguin

‘Strange wit, thorny insights . . . one of the really original prose-stylists.’ — Truman Capote

‘One of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language.’ — John Ashbery, New York Times

‘In the best of Jane Bowles’ fiction her waspish style is not only illuminating but bizarrely entertaining and leaves no doubt of her originality. In Plain Pleasures she appears at her best . . . the stories show that she was a master of the form.’ — Spectator

‘Clear prose, stark and unadorned . . . stories carved out on the far edge of sanity.’ — The Guardian

 

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Excerpt

Everything Is Nice

The highest street in the blue Moslem town skirted the edge of a cliff. She walked over to the thick protecting wall and looked down. The tide was out, and the flat dirty rocks below were swarming with skinny boys. A Moslem woman came up to the blue wall and stood next to her, grazing her hip with the basket she was carrying. She pretended not to notice her, and kept her eyes fixed on a white dog that had just slipped down the side of a rock and plunged into a crater of sea­water. The sound of its bark was earsplitting. Then the woman jabbed the basket firmly into her ribs, and she looked up.

‘That one is a porcupine,’ said the woman, pointing a henna-stained finger into the basket.

This was true. A large there, with a pair of new yellow socks folded on top of it.

She looked again at the woman. She was dressed in a haik, and the white cloth covering the lower half of her face was loose, about to fall down.

‘I am Zodelia,’ she announced in a high voice. ‘And you are Betsoul’s friend.’ The loose cloth slipped below her chin and hung there like a bib. She did not pull it up.

‘You sit in her house and you sleep in her house and you eat in her house,’ the woman went on, and she nodded in agreement.

‘Your name is Jeanie and you live in a hotel with other Nazarenes. How much does the hotel cost you?’

A loaf of bread shaped like a disc flopped on to the ground from inside the folds of the woman’s haik, and she did not have to answer her question. With some difficulty the woman picked the loaf up and stuffed it in between the quills of the porcupine and the basket handle. Then she set the basket down on the top of the blue wall and turned to her with bright eyes.

‘I am the people in the hotel,’ she said. ‘Watch me.’

She was pleased because she knew that the woman who called herself Zodelia was about to present her with a little skit. It would be delightful to watch, since all the people of the town spoke and gesticulated as though they had studied at the Comédie Francaise.

‘The people in the hotel,’ Zodelia announced, formally beginning her skit. ‘I am the people in the hotel.’

”’Good-bye, Jeanie, good-bye. Where are you going?”

”’I am going to a Moslem house to visit my Moslem friends, Betsoul and her family. I will sit in a Moslem room and eat Moslem food and sleep on a Moslem bed.”

‘”Jeanie, Jeanie, when will you come back to us in the hotel and sleep in your own room?”

‘”I will come back to you in three days. I will come back and sit in a Nazarene room and eat Nazarene food and sleep on a Nazarene bed. I will spend half the week with Moslem friends and half with Nazar­enes.”‘

The woman’s voice had a triumphant ring as she finished her sentence; then, without announcing the end of the sketch, she walked over to the wall and put one arm around her basket.

Down below, just at the edge of the cliff’s shadow, a Moslem woman was seated on a rock, washing her legs in one of the holes filled with sea-water. Her haik was piled on her lap and she was huddled over it, examining her feet.

‘She is looking at the ocean,’ said Zodelia.

She was not looking at the ocean; with her head down and the mass of cloth in her lap she could not possibly have seen it; she would have had to straighten up and turn around.

‘She is not looking at the ocean,’ she said.

‘She is looking at the ocean,’ Zodelia repeated, as if she had not spoken.

She decided to change the subject. ‘Why do you have a porcupine with you?’ she asked her, although she knew that some of the Moslems, particularly the country people, enjoyed eating them.

‘It is a present for my aunt. Do you like it?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I like porcupines. I like big por­cupines and little ones, too.’

Zodelia seemed bewildered, and then bored, and she decided she had somehow ruined the conversation by mentioning small porcupines.

‘Where is your mother?’ Zodelia said at length. ‘My mother is in her country in her own house,’ she said automatically; she had answered the question a hundred times.

‘Why don’t you write her a letter and tell her to come here? You can take her on a promenade and show her the ocean. After that she can go back to her own country and sit in her house.’ She picked up her basket and adjusted the strip of cloth over her mouth. ‘Would you like to go to a wedding?’ she asked her.

She said she would love to go to a wedding, and they started off down the crooked blue street, heading into the wind. As they passed a small shop Zodelia stopped. ‘Stand here,’ she said. ‘I want to buy something.’

After studying the display for a minute or two Zodelia poked her and pointed to some cakes inside a square box with glass sides. ‘Nice?’ she asked her. ‘Or not nice?’

The cakes were dusty and coated with a thin, ugly-coloured icing. They were called Galletas Ortiz.

‘They are very nice,’ she replied, and bought her a dozen of them. Zodelia thanked her briefly and they walked on. Presently they turned off the street into a narrow alley and started downhill. Soon Zodelia stopped at a door on the right, and lifted the heavy brass knocker in the form of a fist.

‘The wedding is here?’ she said to her.

Zodelia shook her head and looked grave. ‘There is no wedding here,’ she said.

A child opened the door and quickly hid behind it, covering her face. She followed Zodelia across the black and white tile floor of the closed patio. The walls were washed in blue, and a cold light shone through the broken panes of glass far above their heads. There was a door on each side of the patio. Outside one of them, barring the threshold, was a row of pointed slippers. Zodelia stepped out of her own shoes and set them down near the others.

She stood behind Zodelia and began to take off her own shoes. It took her a long time because there was a knot in one of her laces. When she was ready, Zodelia took her hand and pulled her along with her into a dimly lit room, where she led her over to a mattress which lay against the wall.

‘Sit,’ she told her, and she obeyed. Then without further comment she walked off, heading for the far end of the room. Because her eyes had not grown used to the dimness, she had the impression of a figure disappearing down a long corridor. Then she began to see the brass bars of a bed, glowing weakly in the darkness.

Only a few feet away, in the middle of the carpet, sat an old lady in a dress made of green and purple curtain fabric. Through the many rents in the material she could see the printed cotton dress and the tan sweater underneath. Across the room several women sat along another mattress, and further along the mattress three babies were sleeping in a row, each one close against the wall with its head resting on a fancy cushion.

‘Is it nice here?’ It was Zodelia, who had returned without her haik. Her black crêpe European dress hung unbe1ted down to her ankles, almost grazing her bare feet. The hem was lopsided. ‘Is it nice here?’ she asked again, crouching on her haunches in front of her and pointing at the old woman. ‘That one is Tetum,’ she said. The old lady plunged both hands into a bowl of raw chopped meat and began shaping the stuff into little balls.

‘Tetum’ echoed the ladies on the mattress.

‘This Nazarene,’ said Zodelia, gesturing in her

direction, ‘spends half her time in a Moslem house with Moslem friends and the other half in a Nazarene hotel with other Nazarenes.’

‘That’s nice,’ said the women opposite. ‘Half with Moslem friends and half with Nazarenes.’

The old lady looked very stem. She noticed that her bony cheeks were tattoed with tiny blue crosses.

‘Why?’ asked the old lady abruptly in a deep voice. ‘Why does she spend half her time with Moslem friends and half with Nazarenes?’ She fixed her eye on Zodelia, never ceasing to shape the meat with her swift fingers. Now she saw that her knuckles were also tattooed with blue crosses.

Zodelia stared back at her stupidly. ‘I don’t know why,’ she said, shrugging one fat shoulder. It was clear that the picture she had been painting for them had suddenly lost all its charm for her.

‘Is she crazy?’ the old lady asked.

‘No,’ Zodelia answered listlessly. ‘She is not crazy.’ There were shrieks of laughter from the mattress.

The old lady fastened her sharp eyes on the visitor, and she saw that they were heavily outlined in black. ‘Where is your husband?’ she demanded.

‘He’s travelling in the desert.’

‘Selling things,’ Zodelia put in. This was the popular explanation for her husband’s trips; she did not try to contradict it.

‘Where is your mother?’ the old lady asked.

‘My mother is in our country in her own house.’

‘Why don’t you go and sit with your mother in her own house?’ she scolded. ‘The hotel costs a lot of money.’

‘In the city where I was born,’ she began, ‘there are many, many automobiles and many, many trucks.’

The women on the mattress were smiling pleasantly. ‘Is that true?’ remarked the one in the centre in a tone of polite interest.

‘I hate trucks,’ she told the woman with feeling. The old lady lifted the bowl of meat off her lap and set it down on the carpet. ‘Trucks are nice,’ she said severely.

‘That’s true,’ the women agreed, after only a moment’s hesitation. ‘Trucks are very nice.’

‘Do you like trucks?’ she asked Zodelia, thinking that because of their relatively greater intimacy she might perhaps agree with her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They are nice. Trucks are very nice.’ She seemed lost in meditation, but only for an instant. ‘Everything is nice,’ she announced with a look of triumph.

‘It’s the truth,’ the women said from their mattress. ‘Everything is nice.’

They all looked happy, but the old lady was still frowning. ‘Aicha!’ she yelled, twisting her neck so that her voice could be heard in the patio. ‘Bring the tea!’ Several little girls came into the room carrying the tea things and a low round table.

‘Pass the cakes to the Nazarene,’ she told the smallest child, who was carrying a cut-glass dish piled with cakes. She saw that they were the ones she had bought for Zodelia; she did not want any of them. She wanted to go home.

‘Eat!’ the women called out from their mattress. ‘Eat the cakes.’

The child pushed the glass dish forward.

‘The dinner at the hotel is ready,’ she said, standing up.

‘Drink tea,’ said the old woman scornfully. ‘Later you will sit with the other Nazarenes and eat their food.’

‘The Nazarenes will be angry if I’m late.’ She realized that she was lying stupidly, but she could not stop. ‘They will hit me!’ She tried to look wild and frightened.

‘Drink tea. They will not hit you,’ the old woman told her. ‘Sit down and drink tea.’

The child was still offering her the glass dish as she backed away toward the door. Outside she sat down on the black and white tiles to lace her shoes. Only Zodelia followed her into the patio.

‘Come back,’ the others were calling. ‘Come back into the room.’

Then she noticed the porcupine basket standing nearby against the wall. ‘Is that old lady in the room your aunt? Is she the one you were bringing the porcupine to?’ she asked her.

‘No. She is not my aunt.’

‘Where is your aunt?’

‘My aunt is in her own house.’

‘When will you take the porcupine to her?’ She wanted to keep talking, so that Zodelia would be distracted and forget to fuss about her departure.

‘The porcupine sits here,’ she said firmly. ‘In my own house.’

She decided not to ask her again about the wedding. When they reached the door Zodelia opened it just enough to let her through. ‘Good-bye,’ she said behind her. ‘I shall see you tomorrow, if Allah wills it.’

‘When?’

‘Four o’clock.’ It was obvious that she had chosen the first figure that had come into her head. Before closing the door she reached out and pressed two of the dry Spanish cakes into her hand. ‘Eat them,’ she said graciously. ‘Eat them at the hotel with the other Nazarenes.’

She started up the steep alley, headed once again for the walk along the cliff. The houses on either side of her were so close that she could smell the dampness of the walls and feel it on her cheeks like a thicker air.

When she reached the place where she had met Zodelia she went over to the wall and leaned on it. Although the sun had sunk behind the houses, the sky was still luminous and the blue of the wall had deepened. She rubbed her fingers along it: the wash was fresh and a little of the powdery stuff came off. And she remembered how once she had reached out to touch the face of a clown because it had awakened some longing. It had happened at a little circus, but not when she was a child.
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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. I played guitar as a teenager, poorly, but just competently enough in limited doses to strum one in a couple of bands without looking like Madonna when she straps one on. I don’t know the Barney Farmer, but I’ll investigate it. Thanks. I did see the Leckey thing at Tate Britain. Well, the installation itself was pretty great — people stood or sat under a very impressive-looking exact replica of a freeway overpass that I guess he used to DJ under when young. The piece was in several sections. The first part — video employing footage from ‘Fiorucci is Hardcore’ and related footage — was great, of course. The second part — multi-frame video shown on giant iPhones plus some holographic projections — had a nice look/vibe, but was very, very long and meandering. The last part — a nostalgic, sort of chaotic video paean to selective early 90s Brit rock culture — wasn’t much and had hardly any punch. It was fun being in there, but I left feeling like Leckey really seems to need Rave culture to do anything that’s actually powerful and not just a groovy tech exercise, and that he’s better when he isn’t being overly autobiographical. ** David Ehrenstein, All hail Van Dyke Parks! ** 11:11 Press, Hi, welcome! I just sent you my mailing (and email) address via the contact function of your site. Let me know if you don’t get it. And thank you very much for the offer to send me ‘Little Hollywood’ by Jinnwoo. I’m excited to read it. Take care, and the very best to you! ** Okay. I decided to leak some spotlight on a relatively lesser known but excellent book by the unimpeachable Jane Bowles. Enjoy, perhaps? See you tomorrow.