Spotlight on … Jane Bowles Two Serious Ladies (1942)

 

‘The shock of discovering that a blazingly original writer has antecedents: the shock of turning from Shakespeare to Marlowe, from Tom Wolfe to Céline. In the zoo of last century’s literature, Muriel Spark has to be classed as one of the Great Cats, a slinking killer, cold and carnivorous, a wise fear in her gait. She was weird in ways her contemporaries only pretended to be; I got the sense that she was genuinely weird, floating almost alone in a sea of feigned weirdness, and also genuinely afraid of existence, in a time when her rivals were only just taking correspondence courses in canned Existentialism. Her concision and style, her grasp of the comedic principle that the characters can’t know they’re funny, and her religious contempt for characters that ended up seeming more compassionate than the cheaper, more earthbound compassion — all this establishes her claim to uniqueness, despite the century of British comic tradition at her back.

‘So it was strange to open Jane Bowles’s only novel, Two Serious Ladies, and find the Spark atmosphere hanging there in 1943, more than a decade before Spark began publishing her fiction. Something bizarre and monastic and sexual lurks beneath the unassuming narration. Dread, too, but an amused one. A wry dread, which blooms at the fringes of human activity.

‘No less than musicians, authors have particular sounds, and often these sounds are less a product of their creative effort than of their inculcating milieu. Dostoevsky didn’t invent the way drunken Russians speak; neither Dickens didn’t invent the way pompous lawyers speak; and Charles Portis blowhards are available to speak to you on diverse matters at every rest stop of our republic. What milieu could have produced the sound of both Spark and Jane Bowles? Both had complex links to both Judaism and homosexuality — could that be the recipe?

‘I suspect no. Their books instead concern this subject matter: a woman branching off from regular society, powered by a kind of Ahab madness; or maybe the better image is of a Brothers Grimm child lost in the woods. In The Driver’s Seat, our heroine takes the eros-thanatos link to unprecedented lengths on her unnerving Eurotrip; in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the crème de la crème curdles into a one-woman fascist movement.

‘In Two Serious Ladies, we have two parallel narratives, one of motion and the other of stasis. Mrs. Copperfield and her husband travel to sunny Panama, where the bright colors and sassy sex workers unlock her Anglo heart; what the pendulous fruit of Key West did for the frosty insurance executive Wallace Stevens, the street shouts and impoverished splendor of Central America do for Mrs. Copperfield: they fire her imagination. She’s a napper woken by the crawling sunshine.

‘Meanwhile, stateside, Christina Goering encounters the tubby and childlike Arnold, his more charismatic father, and ends up living with both plus her friend Miss Gamelon, in a house on an island, accessible only by ferry. Why? For no reason, and for every reason. In both narratives, the women form connections and then feel subject to the opposite impulse, to dissolve these connections, to get away, to go live in a strange hotel. Both women enact a fantasy, imbued with large and private significance, of going out to a bar, alone, and meeting new, mysterious people, not exactly for sex (neither of these Serious Ladies seems particularly horny in the physical sense) but in pursuit of some species of emotional commerce, spiritual currents.

‘One of the toughest tasks for a critic is to convey the experience of actually reading a novel. Summarize the themes all you want; talk about the author’s life, but some kernel remains out of reach, and that kernel is the whole point; it’s why the readers keep coming back. After four hundred years, no one has quite managed to say just what the nightmare essence of Hamlet is, its weird rage about sex and cowardice. If anyone had explained that kernel, probably no one would read the play.

‘In Two Serious Ladies, events drift into the fantastic, while maintaining their own hidden logic. Glass perfume bottles get thrown with blood-drawing force; people leave home and move in together with total casualness, almost involuntarily, like sleepwalkers. The novel begins with a Spark feeling and ends up feeling like Luis Buñuel or David Lynch.

‘”[R]eality was often more frightening to her than her wildest dreams,” writes Bowles about Miss Gamelon. Fear, and the overcoming of fear, seem central to the author’s imagination here. Claire Messud writes in her introduction, “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.” Reading this, and the novel that followed, it was hard not to think about Valeria Ugazio, and her description of a “semantics of freedom,” in which life is divided between those who travel and assert themselves and gain independence and those who cling to a circumscribed home life, so cautious they seem cadaverous. Underneath the dream atmosphere of Two Serious Ladies, we can sense a soul wavering between fear and boldness, but unable to choose either. One character writes a letter stating, “I can only say that there is, in every man’s life, a strong urge to leave his life behind him for a while and seek a new one. If he is living near to the sea, a strong urge to take the next boat and sail away no matter how happy his home or how beloved his wife or mother.”

‘Two Serious Ladies is a rare vision. If I had adapt this story to another medium, I think I’d choose ballet; that would provide the requisite gesture (sometimes jerking, sometimes flowing), the dread, the sense of the primitive, the frail and the fierce combining together in a spectacle that’s nearly human.’ — Nicholas Vajifdar, Bookslut

 

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Gallery

early 1940s

1943

w/ Paul Bowles, Truman Capote, a.o., 1944

w/ Oliver Smith, Paul Bowles, 1947 (Irving Penn)

w/ Truman Capote, 1949

1951 (Carl Van Vechten)

w/ Tennessee Williams, Lilla Van Saher, early 1950s

w/ Leonore Gershwin, 1964

w/ Cherifa, late 1967

1970

Malaga, 2010

 

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Further

Jane Bowles Official
THE MADNESS OF QUEEN JANE
Les femmes borderline et désaxées de Jane Bowles
A brief survey of the short story part 17: Jane Bowles
“LOCKED IN EACH OTHER’S ARMS”: JANE BOWLES’S FICTION OF PSYCHIC DEPENDENCY
Jane Bowles’ ‘Two Serious Ladies’ Gone Wild
Nothing is Lost or Found: Desperately Seeking Paul and Jane Bowles
2 August (1947): Jane Bowles to Paul Bowles
American Dreams, 1943: ‘Two Serious Ladies’ by Jane Bowles
THE GATHERING SPIRIT OF JANE BOWLES
Two Serious Ladies confounds with sinister humor and dark delight
Jane Bowles: Inventory of Her Collection at the Harry Ransom Research Center
Un(der)known Writers: Jane Bowles
Lost & Found: Alice Elliott Dark on Jane Bowles
It’s Time to Start Taking Jane Bowles Seriously
Buy ‘Two Serious Ladies’

 

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Extras

Documentary – JANE & PAUL BOWLES (English/Spanish)

Paul Bowles y Jane Bowles, su mundo entre Tánger y Málaga

Visit to the tomb of Jane Bowles

Letter to Paul Bowles from Jane Bowles, 1948

Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane: “A Quarreling Pair”, based on the puppet play by Jane Bowles.

Jane Bowles, último equipaje

 

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Interview
with Bowles scholar Millicent Dillion

 

So let’s talk first about Jane’s life as a writer, because it was not easy. Jane published before Paul did, and it was his work with her on Two Serious Ladies that inspired him to try his hand at fiction. Yet she sank rather quickly into literary obscurity and put her energy into assuring Paul that she didn’t mind if he was the more successful or if people at her publisher [Knopf] pretended not to know whom she was. What do you think her real feelings were about being overshadowed in the world of literature by her (very talented) husband?

The relationship between Jane’s work and Paul’s work was as complex as the relationship between the two of them. In that relationship she looked to him for support (including economic support) as well as early on, as with Two Serious Ladies, with shaping the work in terms of form—so that he suggested taking out the third serious lady, and she readily agreed. In her early letters, when he does start publishing, stories at first, and then getting the novel contract, you can hear the anguish in her voice. She admits to jealousy and then tries to smooth it over, but it’s obviously there. In the same way she suffered from his relationship with [his long-term lover] Ahmed Yacoubi.

As for Paul, he continuously encouraged her to work, and even said once that he would not see her if she did not work. I would guess, though of course, it is only speculation, that it was not his publishing his own work that made her own work so hard for her, it was a whole host of problems that she had to deal with. The rivalry, the jealousy could have been overcome. But the forces within her that she was fighting were never appeased.

Incidentally, Jane’s play was produced several years after Paul had been publishing. He wrote the music for the play. She anguished over that play for years, tried one version, then the next, and could not ultimately make it cohere. There are wonderful things in it, but it too suffers from her anguish about her own decisions.

If Jane had been a man, do you think her fiction would be more widely-known today? Do you think she would have been classed with the more famous male experimental writers, whom she in many ways completely surpassed?

Jane, as you may know, has never been taken up by the feminists. In fact, I don’t think you can strictly speaking regard her as a feminist. If you remember, she thought in very conservative terms about marriage, her marriage to Paul. He was to provide for her, and she was to take care of the house, etcetera. She never seemed to have any objections to that. Here again I am speculating, but I don’t think feminist ideas as such play a large role in her work. She did not think in general terms, in any case.

You ask if a man who wrote as she did would be more famous? A man, of course, could not write as she did.

As for fame, Victoria, think of the many wonderful writers who have fallen into obscurity in this time of no-lasting impact.

How did she do it—how did Jane achieve such economy, insight, and sheer comedy, while simultaneously giving the impression she was an amateur simply playing around with words? Have you ever tried to imitate her work to see how it’s done?

Once Jane got into the writing of Two Serious Ladies, she never thought of herself as an amateur. In some strange way, she knew how good she was, compared herself favorably to Carson McCullers, for example. Yet even though she knew how good she was, the anguish was always there. I was not and am not into literary psychoanalysis, but she opens herself up in the work and in the letters so that you can see all these forces within her. And at the same time, her terrible anguish about any decision.

No, I have never tried to imitate Jane’s style. I am not into imitation. I’ve spent forty years trying to find my own style.

It seems to me the forces within her were based largely upon her relationship with her mother—with her role as Claire’s “million-dollar baby.” Jane’s work appears to be about exploring that relationship from myriad angles: from that of the daughter who retreats in submission and longing; the daughter who rebels and runs wild; the mother with an iron will; and the mother blind to her own extreme dependence. In much of her work these relationships appear as intimate relationships between peers—even sisters—yet the grappling with the power imbalance is always there.

Yes, it does seem clear that was a very powerful force for her in the way you describe it. Yet I also feel that the struggle in her, as in any human being, is more complex than any single issue. This is where literature begins to depart from psychoanalysis, which is after all a therapy intended to bring the patient into a greater adaptation to the world.

I cannot speak of this in very simple straightforward terms because of the complexity of human emotions. That is what I see so strongly in Jane. It is as though multiple forces assail her, and she is continuously buffeted by them from all sides. What makes her different from others, in a certain sense, is that she has no defense against the multiplicity. If she could have said, “My mother did this to me or that to me,” it would have been simpler for her. But instead, I suspect, she would think of herself as assailed one way and then by another.

Jane’s work is replete with insight into paradox. Whenever she finds a fundamental truth, she immediately progresses beyond it to its antithesis. I think the basis of this must have been in the overwhelming duality of her feelings about her mother—the pampering that gave Jane, ultimately, her faith in her abilities, along with the blatant use of Jane for Claire’s emotional well-being.

My immediate response, with respect to Claire, is to recall the strangeness of Claire taking Jane to Switzerland for treatment in the sanatorium [when 13-year-old Jane contracted tuberculosis of the knee shortly after her father died] and then going off and leaving her there while she went to Paris. In Paris, Claire was pursuing her own version of finding a new life, romantic and otherwise. I could bet she didn’t see anything wrong with this, though it is difficult for me to reconcile that choice with Claire’s constant expression of devotion for Jane. No doubt there was something in Claire that could deceive herself easily.

I do think about Jane that her relation to her family of women and its authoritarianism makes her a figure that is in some way incomprehensible to young women now. I remember giving a talk about the book to a group of women, many of whom were irate because she did not break away, they thought, from the constraints upon her, and, in fact, blamed her.

What did they think she was doing in Morocco in the 1940s, making excuses to Moroccan women [as she described in “Everything is Nice”] when they asked, “Why do you not sit in your mother’s house?” I remember Paul saying that they got married partly so Jane could travel, as she could not have traveled alone in that era. She went to enormous lengths to escape, to the extent that she eventually died of her extremist life in Tangier, suffering terrible pyschiatric handicaps due to that stroke and ensuing difficulties, many years before her time.

When I would talk to Paul about Jane in her later years when she was so ill, I would say, with a certain hubris, “But she was still Jane, wasn’t she?” Paul would deny it. Now, so many years later, after going through experiences with friends who suffered from conditions similar to Jane’s, if not exactly the same, and after being torn by grief, anger, etcetera, etcetera, I think I was both wrong and right.

I would like to think some more about Jane’s physical vulnerability, about her relationship to her own body, or at least try to speculate about it. Jane at times seemed almost oblivious to her body. When she called herself “Crippie Kike Dyke,” did she think it was funny? Or was she being more bitter than funny? Think about what it would be for a teenage girl to be in bed in traction for months upon months.

I think she was both fearless and very fearful at the same time, and this would result in her paying no attention to her body at times and at other times being obsessive about it, worrying about it and how it could be damaged.

Why was writing so terribly hard for her? She was pushed to do it and yet pushed not to do it. She is always, I think, subject to opposing forces and cannot choose what side she is on. Decisions of any kind are a torment to her. So in some way, I suspect, despite her anger at her mother, there also existed in her tenderness, if not love, rage, despair, maybe even sympathy.

I suppose what I’m saying is that the multiplicity is there for all of us, but she could not placate it, keep it quiet.

There is also this about Claire. She seems to have been of ordinary—even limited—sensibility, someone interested in clothes, propriety, middle-class values from her family, a family that she never escaped from, maybe never even knew the impulse to escape from them. One of the ways I see it is that Claire was not an equal antagonist, and as a result Jane had to build her up more and more in her mind to create a true antagonist. This she did with her imagination, and by so doing, was more of a prisoner of that imagined Claire than the real one. But how could Jane fight her own imagination? It is in this realm—the realm of her own imagination—that Jane had to fight out her most serious battles. And no one could help her with that.

And yet, despite all that was so dark in her life, it is important to turn again to her work. Reading it, one sees how remarkable and how innovative it is even after all this time, how funny and surprising it is and profound. Perhaps that’s the most surprising thing of all, how profound it is.

 

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Book

Jane Bowles Two Serious Ladies
Ecco

‘Two Serious Ladies is the only novel by avant-garde literary star and wife of legendary writer Paul Bowles—a modernist cult-classic, mysterious, profound, anarchic, and funny, that follows two upper-class women as they descend into debauchery—updated with an introduction by Claire Messud, bestselling author of The Emperor’s Children and The Woman Upstairs.

‘Two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves, Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield embark on separate quests of salvation. Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, where she finds solace among the women who live and work in its brothels. Miss Goering becomes involved with various men. At the end the two women meet again, each transformed by her experience.’ — Ecco

 

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Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, your family, of course. I’m either lucky or unlucky that I was never very close with my family. ‘Latte’ is a real stickler, but I think I’ve managed to dislodge it. So, thank your love. Generally I listen with headphones, but mostly because I don’t really have very good speakers. You? That would make for a very interesting challenge for the blowjob giver. Love convincing Zac to take a short lunch break during our editing today to eat at this great Mexican place near his house, pretty simple, G. ** Jack Skelley, Is that you? You look … so … different. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Thanks, and, yes, the Facebook comment threw me for a loop. A good loop, mind you. ** Darbz 🦒🍜, It feels painful. I think really short people are exciting. It makes me daydream about their lives. Being tall isn’t such a big deal, I don’t think? Obviously there are guys who would pay a lot of money to look like a 13 year old boy, but I know that doesn’t help. I think the power of your personality and impressive mind will easily transcend whatever height you wind up being. Depressive rants are no prob at all. I didn’t even think it was depressive. Whatever the book I recommended was, I hope you end up agreeing with me. That would be sync. Goodbye from inside the headache that my coffee seems to be giving me. xo. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, ‘The Other’. I remember really liking that movie a lot when it came out. Some friends of mine and I used to make this list of the best delivery of the phrase ‘Oh, my God!’ in movies, and the utterance of said phrase in ‘The Other’ was, I think, our number 1. I’m gonna rewatch it. ** Misanthrope, I don’t think I’m very into genre movies. Or genre novels that much either. Rigby’s right, but you’re also right that you shouldn’t rush it. What a dilemma. ** john christopher, Hi, john! I’m fine and somewhat dandy. Being a near lifelong vegetarian, that smell in your room its making me kind of nauseous even way over here. Thanks for listening to my Bookworm thing. And even more so for the kind words about ‘I Wished’. Chasing Bookworm’s Joy Williams interviews something I myself have done too, naturally. It’s been thundering a lot here lately. Thanks about the blog. I hope it’s a good Japanese take away. Commenting, saying hi, lurking … it’s all good around here. Although it is a special treat to actually get to talk. But no pressure. Take care, man. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi. I’m between goodish and good, you? Yes, RIP Teresa Taylor. I need to pull out some Butthole records too. Especially ‘Locust Abortion Technician’. Did your day pan out as planned or did it throw up some surprises. I hope it ruled. ** alex, Hi. Yeah, I still look at things like that. I think I did a spontaneous combustion post here, but I can’t remember. Funny smut story. Nice. Bit of an X-rated ‘Twilight Zone’ vibe going on. All great with you? ** A, Who, me? I mean thank you. Um, no, I don’t think my novels become alien to me afterwards. I guess I think of them as marking a time that has passed or something. For most of my writing life, I always was working on a new novel by the time a novel was published, so I was into that, and that definitely helped. I’ve been kind of a workaholic creative guy since I was a kid, so I think my friends have always known that about me, and our friendships shaped themselves accordingly. But I do think that’s why I was never very good at having a boyfriend. I’ve never fit in. I say enjoy the hell out of that. Cool, thanks for the link to those listings. I’ll try to investigate post-editing today. Buck up, buddy. ** Brian, Hi, Brian. That is really unnerving, isn’t it: the submarine situation. Definitely not how I hope to die. But I hope those people won’t. Although … Okay, yeah, that is confusing about the fellowship. But maybe there’s a bright side, I can if it’s meant to be just an interim project pre: actual project? Anyway, I hope you get clarity. ‘The Servant’ is wonderful, yeah. I know the name Kalil Haddad, or I think I do. Huh. I’ll investigate his work. Ozu: dreamy! Yes, the editing has pretty much devoured everything in my life right now. I saw Sparks live, and they were sublime. I’m going to make room to see the new Wes Anderson ASAP. They’re screening that last Godard short film that premiered at Cannes, and I’m dying to see that. But, yes, I’m pretty much all output and ultra-minimal input right now. Great to see you, pal. How was today? ** Okay. The blog spotlights Jane Bowles’s so wonderful cult classic novel ‘Two Serious Ladies’ today if you know it or don’t. See you tomorrow.